9-11: The "New Pearl Harbor" of the Zionist War Plan

December 18, 2002

As a presidential candidate, George W. Bush’s inner cabal of Zionist war hawks signed a secret Middle East war plan in the summer of 2000 that recognized that America would need to experience a “new Pearl Harbor” if their drastic plans to reshape U.S. defense policy to suit Israel’s agenda were to succeed.

The cabal of war fanatics currently advising the White House secretly planned a “transformation” of defense policy years ago, calling for war against Iraq and huge increases in military spending. A “catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor” was seen as necessary to bring about the desired transformation of the U.S. military.

The huge increases in U.S. military spending that have occurred since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, were planned before President George W. Bush was elected by the same men who are pushing the administration’s “war on terrorism” and the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The huge increases in U.S. military spending that have occurred since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were planned before President George W. Bush was elected by the same men who are pushing the administration's "war on terrorism" and the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Billions of dollars in additional defense spending are but the first step in the group's long-term plan to transform the U.S. military into a global army enforcing a terroristic and bloody Pax Americana around the world.

A neo-conservative Washington-based organization known as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), funded by three foundations closely tied to Persian Gulf oil, weapons, and defense industries, drafted the war plan for U.S. global domination through military power. One of the organization's documents clearly shows that Bush and his most senior cabinet members had already planned an attack on Iraq before he took power in January 2001.

The PNAC was founded in the spring of 1997 by the well-known Zionist neo-conservatives Robert Kagan and William Kristol of the Weekly Standard. The PNAC is part of the New Citizenship Project, whose chairman is also William Kristol, and is described as "a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership." Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz signed a Statement of Principles of the PNAC on June 3, 1997, along with many of the other current members of Bush's "war cabinet." Wolfowitz was one of the directors of PNAC until he joined the Bush administration.

The group's essential demand was for hefty increases in defense spending. "We need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future," the statement's first principle reads. The increase in defense spending is to bring about two of the other principles: "to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values" and "to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles."

A subsequent PNAC plan entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century," reveals that the current members of Bush's cabinet had already planned, before the 2000 presidential election, to take military control of the Gulf region whether Saddam Hussein was in power or not. The 90-page PNAC document from September 2000 says: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

"Even should Saddam pass from the scene," the plan says U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain, despite domestic opposition in the Gulf states to the permanent stationing of U.S. troops. Iran, it says, "may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests as Iraq has."

"A NEW PEARL HARBOR"

A "core mission" for the transformed U.S. military is to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars," according to the PNAC. The strategic "transformation" of the U.S. military into an imperialistic force of global domination would require a huge increase in defense spending to "a minimum level of 3.5 to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, adding $15 billion to $20 billion to total defense spending annually," the PNAC plan said. "The process of transformation," the plan said, "is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor."

I asked Christopher Maletz, assistant director of the PNAC about what was meant by the need for "a new Pearl Harbor." "They needed more money to up the defense budget for raises, new arms, and future capabilities," Maletz said. "Without some disaster or catastrophic event" neither the politicians nor the military would have approved, he said.

The "new Pearl Harbor," in the form of the terror attacks of 9-11, provided the necessary catalyst to put the global war plan into effect. Congress quickly allocated $40 billion to fund the "war on terrorism" shortly after 9-11. A Pentagon spokesman told me that $17.5 billion of that initial allocation went to defense. The U.S. defense budget for 2002, including a $14.5 billion supplement, came to $345.7 billion, a nearly 12 percent increase over the 2001 defense budget. Similar significant increases in defense spending are planned for 2003 (to $365 billion) and 2004 (to at least $378 billion) in line with the PNAC plan.

“TOTAL WAR”

Veteran journalist John Pilger recently wrote about one of PNAC's founding members, Richard Perle: "I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan, and when he spoke about 'total war,' I mistakenly dismissed him as mad," Pilger wrote. "He recently used the term again in describing America's 'war on terror.' 'No stages,' he said. 'This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now.' "

"This is a blueprint for U.S. world domination — a new world order of their making," Tam Dalyell, British parliamentarian and critic of the war policy from the Labor Party said. "These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world. This is garbage from think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks," Dalyell said, "men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war. I am appalled that a British Labor Prime Minister should have got into bed with a crew which has this moral standing."

Bin Laden Tape Exposed as Fake

December 10, 2002

The most recent Osama Bin Laden tape recording is a fake, according to Swiss voice recognition experts, who are 95 percent sure the voice in the tape is that of an impostor.

A respected Swiss institute specializing in voice recognition technology analyzed the recent tape alleged to contain the voice of Osama Bin Laden and found that the voice was most likely that of an impostor. The apparently fraudulent tape came out shortly after a 4,000 word letter allegedly written by Bin Laden appeared in Saudi Arabia.

A French television channel, France 2, commissioned the Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence (IDIAP) of Martigny, Switzerland, to analyze the tape, which was first aired on November 12 by the Arabic language television network, Al-Jazeera. The IDIAP, which is affiliated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, specializes in speech and speaker recognition research.

The tape, which was delivered to the Qatar-based al-Jazeera, was said to provide the first concrete evidence that Bin Laden is still alive because it mentioned attacks that occurred as recently as October 28. The tape was reportedly recorded over the telephone. The voice on the tape praised recent attacks including the siege of a Moscow theatre by Chechen rebels, the bombing of a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen, and the Bali bombing.

Voice analysis tests done of the tape indicated the speaker was an impostor, according to Hervé Boulard, the institute's director. Boulard, told France 2 that he was 95 per cent certain that "it has not been recorded by Bin Laden." Boulard, who previously worked with the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, said there was a 5 percent risk of error in the institute's conclusion that the latest tape is a fake.

Regarding the poor sound quality of the recent tape, Boulard said: "Many of our 20 [test] recordings were also of poor quality. Some were very good, some very bad, but our results were all positive except in one case."

France 2 provided IDIAP with one hour of authenticated videotape recordings of Bin Laden. IDIAP created a computerized model of Bin Laden's voice from the authentic recordings. To verify the reliability, scientists tested that model with recordings from Bin Laden and others that were not. IDIAP compared the voice on the tape with 20 authentic recordings of Bin Laden. Boulard concluded that all the voices except that on the tape in question belonged to the same person, noting the statistical software he used has a margin of error of around five percent, France 2 reported.

While Boulard says the tape does not appear to be the voice of Osama Bin Laden, the margin of error precludes absolutely certainty. "In order to have an irrefutable conclusion, you would need around 100 recordings of Bin Laden," IDIAP's researcher Samy Bengio told Swiss radio.

The IDIAP study concluded: "It is difficult to agree with some US officials saying that it is 100 percent sure that it is Bin Laden. When addressing a problem with a scientific perspective (as opposed to a political approach), one has to be ready to also accept the uncertainty of the results." The Swiss results challenged U.S. intelligence agency reports that the voice on the tape was Bin Laden's.

I asked Pentagon spokesman Dave Lapan if U.S. intelligence agencies believe the latest Bin Laden tape is genuine. Lapan said, "Although it could not be confirmed with 100 percent certainty, the assessment from the intelligence community is that the tape is genuine." He added that he was "not aware of a different analysis from another country."

A French news magazine, L'Express, recently reported that Bernard Gautheron, director of the phonetic testing laboratory in Paris, had concluded there was a "very strong probability" that the Al Jazeera tape was genuine.

Qatar, the home of Al Jazeera is a small emirate in the Persian Gulf described as the "nerve center of a war against Iraq." The Emir of Qatar, who provided funding to start Al Jazeera, has also provided the U.S. military with a command center and spent more than $1 billion building the Al Udeid Air Base for U.S. warplanes. Seven hundred members of the U.S. Central Command are currently in Qatar for Exercise Internal Look, a war game to test the systems that would be used in a war against Iraq.

Legal Experts: Pre-emptive War Illegal

December 4, 2002

Bush's policy of "preemptive action" opens the door to global gangsterism. Through its words and deeds the administration of President Bush has shown its intent to disregard international law and pursue a criminal policy of "preemptive action," having adopted the Israeli term for what is otherwise known as "war of aggression."

"The president, of course, supports preemptive action," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on Dec. 2. "The president has said that is part of America's doctrine because of the different nature of terrorism."

Fleischer was responding to a reporter who had misquoted John Howard, the Australian prime minister, by saying: "Australia intended to take preemptive military action to fight terrorists in the wake of the Bali attack." The reporter then asked: "Does the president support the preemptive military action against terrorists in Asia?"

Howard's contentious remarks about preemptive action were taken out of context and resulted in a flurry of protest from a host of Asian states. Howard had said that the UN charter on self defense needed to be amended to allow states to use preemptive action against threats of terrorism.

The UN Charter is a treaty binding upon the United and other member states. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force by a state that is not subject to an armed attack. Article 2 stipulates the states renounce "the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state."

Speaking about "non-state terrorism," Howard said: "All I'm saying - I think many people are saying - is that maybe the body of international law has to catch up with the new reality."

I asked Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois, about the legal questions. Boyle said: "Howard said that the UN charter has to be amended to allow for preemptive strikes to be legal."

Calls to the White House were not returned.

As the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945 noted, "resort to a war of aggression is not merely illegal, but is criminal."

"To initiate a war of aggression," the tribunal declared in its judgment, "is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

UN Security Resolution1441, which sent the weapons inspectors back to Iraq, does not authorize any use of force against Iraq, Boyle said. Secretary of State Colin Powell tried, and failed to get language into the resolution allowing the use of force, Boyle said.

Zionist 'Prince of Darkness' Craves War

November 27, 2002

The Pentagon's top civilian security adviser told an assembly of British politicians that the United States would attack Iraq even if UN inspectors fail to find weapons of mass destruction.

Richard Perle, President Bush's hawkish adviser known as "The Prince of Darkness," "stunned" British parliamentarians (MP) by saying a "clean bill of health" from UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix would not prevent a U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. The provocative comments by Perle, who has been a lobbyist for an Israeli arms manufacturer, were reported in an article titled "War, Whatever" in the Mirror, a British journal, on Nov. 20.

Former British Defense Minister and Labour Party MP Peter Kilfoyle said: "America is duping the world into believing it supports these inspections." President Bush intends to go to war even if inspectors find nothing. This makes a mockery of the whole process and exposes America's real determination to bomb Iraq," Kilfoyle said.

The Iraqi regime is in the difficult position of having to prove a negative - that it doesn't possess banned weapons. As Perle told the MPs: "I cannot see how Hans Blix can state more than he can know. All he can know is the results of his own investigations. And that does not prove Saddam does not have weapons of mass destruction."

Perle, who chairs a Pentagon advisory board said: "Suppose we are able to find someone who has been involved in the development of weapons and he says there are stores of nerve agents. But you cannot find them because they are so well hidden. Do you actually have to take possession of the nerve agents to convince? We are not dealing with a situation where you can expect cooperation."

Kilfoyle said: "Because Saddam is so hated in Iraq, it would be easy to find someone to say they witnessed weapons building. Perle says the Americans would be satisfied with such claims even if no real evidence was produced. That's a terrifying prospect."

Spy Agency's 9-11 Drill Exposes Government Lies

November 1, 2002

On 11 September 2001, a key U.S. intelligence agency was running a drill in which a plane hits a government building. While U.S. spy satellites could easily observe what actually happened in New York City and Washington, this "bizarre coincidence" sent the people who operate America's "eye in the sky" home.

On the very day that planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the "super-secret" intelligence agency that "designs, builds, and operates U.S. reconnaissance satellites" had planned to conduct an emergency drill in which a simulated plane from the nearby Dulles International Airport would have crashed into their building. When reality intruded in New York and Washington, the exercise was cancelled and nearly all of NRO's three thousand employees, the people who operate the nation's "eye in the sky," were sent home.

The NRO, which works closely with the Dept. of Defense and CIA, had planned a simulated exercise in which a small jet "crashes" into one of the four towers at the agency's headquarters on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The government said it was a "bizarre coincidence" that one of the most important U.S. intelligence agencies had planned a mock plane-into-building crash on Sept. 11, according to the Associated Press who reported the story on August 22. NRO headquarters are in Chantilly, Virginia, about 4 miles from the runways of Dulles airport.

The secretive NRO was created in 1960 and oversees the nation's spy satellites for reconnaissance and defense purposes. For the first 32 years the U.S. government even denied its existence. The NRO recruits personnel from the military and the Central Intelligence Agency and has a budget that is estimated to equal the combined budgets of both the CIA and the National Security Agency.

The director of the NRO (DNRO) reports directly to the Secretary of Defense and the director of the CIA. On 11 September 2001 the NRO director was Keith R. Hall, who had headed the agency since 1996. As DNRO, Hall was responsible for the acquisition and operation of all United States space-based reconnaissance and intelligence systems. Hall also served as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space until December 8, 2001 when Peter B. Teets replaced Hall in both positions.

Hall had joined the Pentagon during the administration of George H.W. Bush, as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and security, where he remained into the Clinton administration, until then CIA Director John M. Deutch brought him to the CIA. Hall crafted Deutch's plan to create a new spy bureaucracy in the Pentagon, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) by merging the CIA's center for interpreting spy satellite imagery with the Defense Mapping Agency.

"As Director, NRO, I have responsibility for the design, acquisition, and operations of all the nation's reconnaissance satellites, reporting to the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence," Hall told the Senate subcommittee on strategic forces in 1999.

The fact that the NRO had planned a scenario on 9-11 that was remarkably similar to what actually happened exposes the lie by some senior administration officials who claimed the events of 9/11 had not been foreseen. The "bizarre co-incidence" between the planned exercise and the grim reality suggests that the "game" was hijacked by unknown agents who overlaid it with a lethal scheme in the same way that former Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated during what was meant to be a security exercise.

The existence of the NRO's pre-planned plane-attack simulation was first revealed in an announcement of a recent National Law Enforcement and Security Institute conference in Chicago. In a promotion for speaker John Fulton, a CIA officer assigned as chief of NRO's strategic gaming division, the announcement read: "On the morning of September 11th 2001, Mr. Fulton and his team ... were running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building. Little did they know that the scenario would come true in a dramatic way that day."

It was American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 767, which took off from Dulles at 8:10 a.m., 50 minutes before the NRO exercise was to begin, that reportedly struck the Pentagon on Sept. 11. The Pentagon was hit between 9:30 and 9:40 a.m. with 125 deaths on the ground and 64 reported on the plane.

The NRO scenario was planned to test employees' ability to respond to a disaster, according to Art Haubold, spokesman for the agency. No actual plane was to be involved. To simulate the damage from the crash, some stairwells and exits were to be closed off, forcing employees to find other ways to evacuate the building. Haubold told me that is was meant to be a "make believe" drill, "like the fire drills we did as kids in school."

I asked Haubold why NRO's staff was sent home when there was no apparent imminent danger. Haubold said NRO employees had been sent home as federal workers in Washington had. A spokesperson at NIMA in Bethesda, Md., however, said that NIMA personnel had remained on the job on 9-11. NIMA is headed by Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper (USAF Ret.).

Asked about how many people at the Dept. of Defense and CIA had been made aware of the planned exercise, Haubold said that the Pentagon and the CIA were aware of the drill, which he called a "contingency response" test. Pentagon spokesman Ken McClellan could not say whether Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was aware of the exercise at NRO. However, regarding the threat of an airplane attack at the Pentagon or the World Trade Center, McClellan said, "people were prescient."

"It was just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve an aircraft crashing into our facility," Haubold told the AP. "As soon as the real world events began, we canceled the exercise."

While the story of the "bizarre coincidence" is of obvious interest, it has been removed from news websites where it appeared in late August. CNN and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for example, have both removed the story.

On Sept. 11, almost all of the 3,000 people who work at NRO headquarters were sent home, according to Art Haubold, NRO spokesman. Haubold said that after 10:30 a.m. the only people who remained at the agency were "mission essential" personnel.

The Death of a Senator and 9-11: The Uncanny Connections

November 1, 2002

The untimely death of Minnesota's populist senator in a suspicious plane crash 11 days before Election Day reveals several bizarre and uncanny connections to 9/11.

The mysterious plane crash that took the life of U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, the populist Democrat from Minnesota known for his opposition to waging war in Iraq, immediately raised suspicions of foul play in the North Star state. A poster hanging in Minneapolis asked: "Who killed Paul Wellstone?" Since the crash, uncanny links have surfaced connecting the World Trade Center attack, the co-pilot of Wellstone's plane, and the "elite" FBI Evidence Response Team that investigated the wreck.

On Friday, October 25, the plane carrying the incumbent Sen. Wellstone, his wife, daughter, and three campaign workers, crashed into the woods after veering 2 miles off course on its approach to the Eveleth-Virginia municipal airport in the remoteness of the Iron Range north of Duluth, Minnesota. Eleven days before the election Wellstone was reported to be leading 47-41 in the polls and gaining over his Republican challenger, Norm Coleman. There has been no explanation given for why the chartered twin engine Beech King Air A100 with a pilot and a co-pilot, veered sharply to the south as it approached the runway from the east. Although the plane was carrying a U.S. senator, it had neither a cockpit voice nor a flight data recorder.

At 10:22 in the morning, as the King Air A100 approached Eveleth airport, visibility was between 3 and 4.5 miles with overcast cloud ceiling at 700 feet. Winds were calm and the temperature was 1-2 degrees C. There was light snow falling but flying conditions were generally good, according to local pilots.

I spoke with Gary Ulman, professional pilot and assistant manager of the Eveleth airport. Ulman heard radio reports that a plane was missing and took off about 10:55 to look. He said that while he saw "light bluish-grayish smoke" coming up from the trees 2.1 miles south of the airport, he didn't think that it could be the plane because "that was way too far off course."

I asked Ulman several times to clarify the color of the smoke because his description of "light blue" smoke coming from the crash site is different from the expected thick black smoke that is usually seen coming from fires in which aviation fuel is the primary substance burning. Ulman flew over the smoke and said that he saw a "hot and intense fire" consuming the plane's fuselage on the ground. He returned to the airport and took the local fire chief up to survey the crash site and determine how to access the wreck from the ground. Ulman said that on this flight, at about 11:15 a.m., he saw that the burning fuselage had nearly "disintegrated." The plane's tail and wings had been detached from the body of the plane, he said. It is important to note that the King Air's fuel tanks are located in the wings of the plane; there is no fuel tank in the fuselage.

While some reports suggested that icing on the plane caused the crash, Ulman and other pilots doubt that ice played a role. Frank Matthews, a local pilot, said that the King Air is "a great all weather plane" that has "an outstanding safety record." Ulman said that if icing were a factor it would have caused problems at least 10 minutes earlier as the plane descended from 14,000 feet. FAA spokeswoman, Elizabeth Isham Cory, said there didn't appear to be any sign of distress coming from the plane's crew on its final approach to the airport.

I spoke with Rick Wahlberg, sheriff of St. Louis County, who said that local police and FBI agents reached the remote crash site "at about 12" [noon]. Paul McCabe, special agent and spokesman for the FBI's Minneapolis division, told me that the FBI's Evidence Response Team (ERT) drove to the site from the Twin Cities and arrived at the crash scene about 3 p.m. on Oct. 25.

McCabe said that the FBI was treating the site as a "crime scene" but that there were "no indications of any criminal activity" causing the crash. The ERT worked at the scene all day before a team of National Traffic Safety Board (NTSB) investigators arrived from Washington that night.

Agents from the FBI's Minneapolis Evidence Response Team have been accused of stealing evidence from the site of the World Trade Center, where they had been sent to investigate. The stolen evidence was a valuable Tiffany crystal paperweight taken from a WTC evidence bag. FBI agent Jane Turner, assigned to the Minneapolis field office, reported the suspected theft. Turner decided to blow the whistle after FBI officials declined to investigate the matter.

Turner first wrote Inspector General Glenn Fine on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks that an elite FBI "evidence response team" from Minneapolis may have stolen a Tiffany crystal globe from the ruins of the World Trade Center. She said she spotted the globe, worth more than $5,000, sitting on a secretary's desk. Citing the ongoing investigation of her allegations, FBI officials have declined to discuss the circumstances under which the globe was taken or to explain why an allegedly stolen item would be displayed so prominently in a law enforcement office.

Turner, a 24-year FBI veteran, was investigating a company in the theft of several items from ground zero when she discovered that Minneapolis agents assigned to an Evidence Response Team (ERT) at the World Trade Center had taken the globe.

"The ERT is supposed to secure and collect evidence at a crime scene. Their job is to preserve the integrity of a crime scene, not take from it and disrupt it," Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, said about the accusations, which he said had been referred to the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General. "I think it's outrageous," Grassley said. "Maybe some people who work at these scenes think that taking something is OK, like it's a trophy for their hard work. "This makes me wonder what else these agents stole, if they were generous enough to give an expensive crystal globe to a secretary," he said.

Turner is the second Minneapolis agent to accuse bureau personnel of wrongdoing. Earlier this year, FBI Agent Coleen Rowley accused officials at FBI headquarters of mishandling information developed in Minneapolis concerning 9-11 suspect Zacharias Moussaoui. The FBI has since taken steps toward firing Turner. Turner, a 24-year veteran, has been on probation for much of the last year and was recently told during a job evaluation that her performance is "not acceptable."

Grassley said the action "looks like retaliation against a whistle-blower who followed her conscience and exposed wrongdoing, even though it embarrassed the FBI. If there are plans to fire her, the FBI is making a big mistake, and I want the people behind this retaliation held accountable."

"PROGRESSIVE POPULIST"

Wellstone, described as "the most progressive populist in the Senate" had recently voted against giving President George W. Bush's "flexibility" to attack Iraq. Wellstone also opposed U.S. military action in Iraq in 1990. Wellstone was the only Democrat senator who was running for re-election to vote against the recent war resolution.

Wellstone's opposition to the war had given him a boost in the polls. The headline of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on the Sunday before he died read: "Wellstone edges into lead in U.S. Senate race." The paper's latest poll had found the two-term liberal Democratic senator to be leading by a 47-41 margin.

The White House had recruited former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman to run against Wellstone. "Republicans made ousting Wellstone a priority because of his vocal opposition to most of what George W. Bush stands for," the Center for Voting and Democracy said in July. The senate race in Minnesota was seen as crucial for the White House. Bush's political director Karl Rove is said to have personally selected Coleman to challenge Wellstone in the November 5 election. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney frequently visited Minnesota to support Coleman.

A mysterious Alexandria, Virginia-based outfit, calling itself Americans for Job Security (AJS), with ties to big business and the Republican congressional leadership had spent more than $1 million on an anti-Wellstone ad campaign in Minnesota before the election. AJS has a record of intervening in close political races around the country on behalf of conservative candidates. The organization, headed by Michael Dubke, was founded with $1 million from the American Insurance Association. In order to maintain the secrecy of its donors, AJS is registered as a "nonpolitical trade organization."

Dubke said there is no contradiction between the group's ads and its nonpolitical legal status. He said AJS, which had advertised against Wellstone since June, had no desire to influence the outcome of the Minnesota race. Asked by the Star-Tribune whether the anti-Wellstone commercials were "intended to influence the election," Dubke replied, "Absolutely not."

Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, which advocates campaign finance changes, said it is "dead wrong to spend large amounts of money in elections and refuse to disclose where it's coming from."

MOUSSAOUI & THE CO-PILOT

The co-pilot who flew with Wellstone had known Zacharias Moussaoui, the accused Sept. 11 conspirator who had attended an Eagan (Minn.) flight school. Co-pilot Michael Guess, 30, had met the flying student Moussaoui at the Pan Am International Flight Academy where Guess worked last year. Guess had reportedly "inadvertently" given Moussaoui unattended access to a computer program on flying a 747 jumbo jet.

An ex-manager of Pan Am told the FBI that Guess had placed a CD-ROM containing the 747 software at a workstation before one of Moussaoui's training sessions. After Moussaoui was arrested, the FBI searched his belongings and found the proprietary program copied on his laptop computer, the ex-manager said. Guess had recently been laid off at the flight academy, where he had hoped to become a flight instructor.

"At Executive Aviation in Eden Prairie, where Guess had been employed as a pilot since June 2001, a spokesman said colleagues remembered Guess telling them he had played a more significant role regarding the suspicions concerning Moussaoui," the Star Tribune reported. Dave Mona, a spokesman for Executive Aviation, said Guess' colleagues had said HE had described himself as "at least a role player" in the detection of Moussaoui. Mona said Guess had told his colleagues that "he and the receptionist . . . thought what [Moussaoui] was requesting was unusual" and had raised the issue with others.

9-11 Evidence Hidden from Public

October 23, 2002

The continuing secrecy surrounding the events of Sept.11 makes the work of independent investigators and publishers all the more essential to understanding what really happened.

"The most detailed analysis of how and why the World Trade Center collapsed could be forever kept from the public," the Associated Press reported Sept. 30. The evidence being withheld includes "rare photos and videos" that have been "collected," documentary evidence, maps of the debris piles, and three-dimensional computerized images of the fallen towers, according to the New York Times.

The evidence that is locked away, and may be permanently sealed, has been "gathered largely in secret" by experts who are forbidden by confidential agreements from discussing their findings, except with federal investigators, said Gerald McKelvey, a spokesman for Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of the office space in the twin towers.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the Trade Center complex, said in a statement that access to documents would be decided on a "case-by-case basis consistent with applicable law and policy."

Silverstein obtained control of the World Trade Center property a mere six weeks before the terror attacks by securing the 99-year lease with an initial payment of $100 million, most of which was reported to be borrowed funds. Silverstein is currently seeking to win some $7 billion on his relatively minuscule investment by suing the insurance companies and claiming that the WTC attacks constituted "two separate occurrences," rather than one.

The secret "expert analysis" is considered more authoritative than the investigation conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which "suffered from too few resources and a lack of access to critical information," according to AP. The secrecy surrounding Sept.11 has succeeded in keeping the American public in the dark about what truly caused the collapse of the twin towers, as well as the 47-story WTC-7, built by Silverstein in 1987. WTC-7 mysteriously collapsed in the late afternoon.

Serious questions also abound about what actually struck the Pentagon and why no evidence of a commercial jet was found at the site. I have worked with a number of independent investigators to uncover the most important information about the attacks. One American author, Eric Hufschmid, has written a book about 9-11, Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack, which presents compelling evidence that the attacks were "a scam of immense proportions."

He says that explosives were used to take down the towers and WTC-7 and that the Arab "terrorists" were mere patsies, like Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of President John Kennedy. It is a well-written and illustrated book that contains rare photos of great importance, some of which are certain to be among those the government is trying to hide. The high-quality large-format photos provide important evidence about what caused the collapses at the World Trade Center, WTC-7, and the Pentagon. The book presents photographic evidence to support the theory that the twin towers of the World trade center were brought down using radio-controlled explosives. He says the emergency command center, a hardened bunker on the 23rd floor of WTC-7, was the actual control center for the attack, and that the two airplanes that hit the towers appear to have been guided by a homing signal coming from the bunker.

WTC-7 was a most unusual building. While the hardened bunker on the 23rd floor had its own air and water supply, it had no accommodations for sleeping, which raises the obvious question about what kind of emergency it was designed for. The WTC-7 building was subsequently destroyed by controlled demolition that lasted 18 seconds according to seismic data, yet the actual collapse took less that 10 seconds in the late afternoon. The other powerful blasts were to destroy the evidence from the hardened bunker, according to the author.

The remarkable photos in Painful Questions show the top 30 floors of the South Tower tipping and falling in one piece, yet solid pieces of this section never hit the ground.

How can it be, Painful Questions asks, that the towers collapsed floor-by-floor as quickly as free-falling debris fell through the open air? The video and seismic evidence show that the towers collapsed in 8 to 10 seconds, which is how long a falling object dropped from the top of the tower would take to hit the ground. The resistance of the undamaged base of the tower would have significantly slowed the collapse of the towers. For 110 floors to shatter in about nine seconds, each floor would have shattered in the blink of an eye. he says, "There should have been a thump, thump, thump and the collapsing rubble impacted the floor below, but the video shows that the floors did not encounter any resistance as they fell."

Painful Questions explains how explosives could accomplish this trick. Photos of debris being spewed horizontally hundreds of feet raise further questions about whether it was precision-timed explosions or "compression" which caused the towers to disintegrate, sending pulverized concrete and bits of steel flying over lower Manhattan.

John Iannarelli of the FBI's national press office told me the bureau has "no evidence" of explosions at the WTC and that "compression" pulverized the concrete and sent steel beams flying horizontally for hundreds of feet. Others say this is evidence that explosives were used. While the Pentagon attack has been largely obscured by the collapses at the World Trade center, there are as many unanswered questions about what actually happened at the Pentagon.

In October, two books about 9/11 by French author Thierry Meyssan arrived in the United States. Meyssan focused on the Pentagon attack on his books, which have been translated from French, 9-11: the Big Lie and Pentagate. The publisher, Patrick Pasin, said the television show "60 Minutes" was coming to France to interview Meyssan and that the author is now willing to travel the United states to discuss his work.

Meyssan presents photographic evidence that challenges the claim that a large passenger jet struck the Pentagon. He posits that an air-launched cruise missile, painted to look like a commercial jet, struck the Pentagon. I have repeatedly asked the Pentagon, American Airlines, and the FBI for basic information about the 9-11 attack, in particular about the unexplained pieces of debris, assumed to be a piece of an American Airlines jet, that was photographed on the Pentagon lawn. After numerous requests for clarification about the status of the large piece of debris, Lt. Col. David Lapan, spokesman for the Department of defense, finally said, "It's not a Pentagon issue."

As American Airlines routinely forwards all 9-11 information requests to the FBI, I turned to FBI headquarters in Washington. The FBI's Iannarelli said: "It is no secret that an airplane hit the Pentagon."

However, the object that bored a smooth seven-foot round hole through six-reinforced concrete walls in the three rings of the Pentagon left no traces of itself behind. "The plane that struck the Pentagon was pulverized," Iannarelli said. "Never was any large piece of anything recovered at the Pentagon crash site," he said.

Asked whether the dense steel landing gear, which had carried right on through the WTC twin towers and landed blocks away, had been found at the Pentagon, Iannarelli said, "nothing that was recognizable" as coming from an airplane was found.

There are no clear seismic signals, which can be associated with the crash of a 100-ton airplane into the Pentagon, according to seismologists. I asked Maryland-based seismologist Gerald Baum about the lack of seismic evidence from the Pentagon crash. If a large jet aircraft traveling 400 miles per hour struck the Pentagon, why did it not result in any recorded seismic shock waves?

Baum said that that although the seismometers near the Pentagon are "state-of-the-art," the fact that the Pentagon was built on swampland on a base that is "all fill" means the impact is less likely to have resulted in seismic shock waves because the building "is not anchored to the bedrock."

Readers of Gen. Ben Partin's investigation of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma city have concluded that Tim McVeigh was a patsy. Hufschmid says he "soon realized what AFP readers have known for long time; namely, that a lot of critical information is being hidden by our corrupt media and government."

El Al Crash Exposes Israel's Chemical Weapons Arsenal

October 9, 2002

Israel's huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction—not Iraq's—poses the most serious threat to peace in the Middle East and endangers global health. While the controlled U.S. press remains fixated on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, it ignores the grave danger of the more sophisticated and lethal arsenal of weapons of mass destruction being developed and stored in Israel—with the support of the U.S.

Ten years ago, on Oct. 4, 1992, an Israeli cargo jet carrying three of the four components of the nerve gas Sarin, as well as other hazardous materials, crashed into an apartment building in Holland. The known facts of the crash of El Al Flight 1862, the worst air disaster in Dutch history, reveal that Holland's government engaged in a "huge cover-up" and lied to its citizens to help conceal Israel's unlawful chemical weapons arsenal and the international network that supports it.

The Israeli cargo plane, a Boeing 747-200F, with three crewmen, one non-paying passenger and 114 tons of freight, left Amsterdam's Schiphol airport at 6:21 p.m. en route to Tel Aviv. Seven minutes later, both starboard engines ripped loose from the wing. The pilot circled back to attempt an emergency landing and crashed into a high-rise apartment complex in Bijlmer, 10 miles east of Schiphol.

While only four people died on the plane, the crash of El Al Flight 1862 became the worst air disaster in Dutch history because it killed scores of people on the ground and destroyed the health of thousands of others by exposing them to the toxic chemicals on the plane. The exact number of dead is still not known.

In the immediate aftermath of the crash, Dutch government officials lied to the public saying the plane was only transporting flowers and perfume. It took six years before the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad revealed the true contents of the crashed plane and their destination. "The cargo documents show that the aircraft carried dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP) and two other substances needed to make the deadly nerve gas Sarin. The DMPP was destined for the Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR)," the paper reported in October 1998.

Mouin Rabbani, writing in Middle East International, describes the IIBR, located at Nes Zion near Tel Aviv, as "the Israeli military and intelligence community's front organization for the development, testing and production of chemical and biological weapons."

I interviewed Pierre Heijboer, a senior editor with the Dutch Volkskrant newspaper, who lives a mile from Bijlmer and was one of the first reporters on the scene. "I was in Biafra and Vietnam, but I never saw anything like that crash. It was like looking into a steel smelter," Heijboer said. "The concrete of the flats was glowing red."

Heijboer despises the cover-up: "I just get angry that they lied. It wasn't that the Israelis were flying cargoes of ugly stuff above my head. What angers me is that my government lies to its citizens." Tapes of phone conversations between El Al and Schiphol Air Traffic Control (SATC) reveal collusion to conceal the plane's contents.

In one tape, recorded minutes after the crash and hidden in a safe for more than six years, an El Al employee tells an SATC employee: "There is poison on board: ammunition and flammable liquids." The SATC official responded: "We will keep these things under the lid."

Dutch authorities sent workers to clean up the contaminated area without the benefit of protective clothing. Even Holland's Queen Beatrix, despite being a long-time Bilderberg participant, was not informed of the danger when she made a visit to the crash site the next day. "For the government and authorities of the Netherlands the safety of its own citizens is less important than the security of El Al military cargo planes," Heijboer said.

Heijboer's new exposé on the crash, Doomed Flight, was released Sept. 21, and quickly became a best seller.

Heijboer says 30 eyewitnesses saw Israeli agents in white chemical outfits at the crash scene, sifting through the debris and removing critical evidence. A 1998 Dutch police report says officers on the scene recognized the men in white suits who absconded with evidence as Israeli agents. "As they came near, I thought I recognized them. They looked just like the young men from the Israeli security service who regularly practice shooting at our police school," one officer said. "I've often said to people: 'Mossad was there first.'"

Another officer said: "We started to unroll a red and white ribbon to seal off the area. The 10 men ignored this and, when I managed to grab one by his arm, he said, 'We're from El Al.' Oh well, must be okay then I thought. They must have been in radio contact with the crew. How else could they have gotten here so fast?"

A fireman, Carel Boer, said: "We had to stand aside while people in astronaut-like suits carried away a kind of box. I couldn't see what it was since it was covered with a blanket." The plane's "black box" flight recorder was never recovered, and El Al refused to reveal the cargo manifest.

An estimated 3,000 Dutch residents suffer health problems as a result of the chemical and radioactive poisoning that occurred when El Al 1862 crashed. Today there is growing awareness in Holland of Israel's privileged and unregulated use of Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport to transport dangerous military cargo, a practice that clearly puts the health of the Dutch people at risk.

"El Al has its own security force at Schiphol," Heijboer said. "But they don't work for El Al -- they are all from Shin Bet (Israeli secret service) and are paid by the Israeli embassy. The Israelis run the airport like a little Haifa." Dutch Attorney General Vrakking testified on Jan. 29, 1999, that the El Al security detachment at Schiphol was a branch of Mossad.

"Schiphol has become a hub for secret weapons transfers," charged Henk van der Belt, an investigator working with the Bijlmer survivors. "Dutch authorities have no jurisdiction over Israeli activities at the airport." A TV Amsterdam (TVA) report identified Schiphol as one of several European airports that allows El Al to transfer cargo without supervision.

TVA said Belgian politicians now fear that "a disaster like the crash in Holland in 1992 is possible at [Belgium's] Zaaventem. This airport is, like Schiphol, under control by the secret police of Israel."

The Dutch press reported that security officials had been waiving Israeli air cargo through Schiphol, El Al's European hub, since the 1950s. "Of course it continues," Heijboer said. "There are rules, but there is an exception—El Al is allowed to ignore the rules."

A Dutch Air Guidance Organization employee told a parliamentary hearing that "policy" since 1973 was to keep quiet about all El Al activities. Schiphol workers testified that customs or the Dutch Flight Safety Board never inspected El Al planes.

A parliamentary committee discovered that every Sunday evening a mysterious El Al cargo flight routinely touched down at Schiphol en route from New York to Tel Aviv. These flights did not appear on airport arrival monitors, the cargo was never checked, and the documentation for the flights was processed in a special, unmarked room.

Shipping precursors of chemical weapons, such as those aboard 1862, is a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which the U.S. is party to. Solkatronic Chemicals of Morrisville, Pa., had sold the DMMP. The chemical is a Schedule 2 precursor for Sarin under the CWC and its export is strictly controlled by the U.S. government. In spite of this, the Department of Commerce repeatedly granted Solkatronic a license to ship DMMP to IIBR. Spokesmen at the Dept. of Commerce were unable to say whether such shipments would continue.

I asked the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague about Israel's use of Schiphol to transport components for chemical weapons.

Peter Kaiser, spokesman for OPCW, was not familiar with the details of flight 1862 but said that Israel, as a non-member, which has signed but not ratified the treaty, was obliged to "respect the convention."

Israel has never admitted producing chemical or biological weapons and, because it is not a member state of the CWC, is not required to divulge what chemical weapons it has or accept inspectors. However, a member state, such as the United States, is proscribed from providing a non-member state like Israel chemical weapons or precursor chemicals such as DMMP.

The Israeli government was finally compelled to admit that the jet had been carrying 190 liters of DMPP, a crucial component of Sarin. Sarin, 20 times as lethal as cyanide, kills by crippling the nervous system and was used in a terror attack on the Tokyo underground system that killed six passengers and injured more than 3,000.

In 1992, any revelation that the U.S. was supplying Israel with the components to make chemical weapons was played down, because alleged Iraqi development of chemical weapons has been used for propaganda purposes to justify U.S. aggression against Iraq. Jan Medema, a chemical weapons inspector from the toxic substances division at the Dutch Defense Research Institute in The Hague, said the quantity of Sarin components on the plane was sufficient to generate more than a quarter of a ton of the deadly nerve gas.

Heijboer said this was the third known shipment of these chemicals to the IIBR. The fact that the IIBR was the destination of the cargo indicates to Medema that this shipment was to create a large amount of Sarin.

"We have been trying to think what possible research purposes you would need this compound in such large quantities for," Medema said. "The likelihood has to be that it was for Sarin. Either they had some special plan for an experiment or they needed a quantity of Sarin for some special purpose. This raises many questions."

Uzi Mahnaimi of the Times said that Israeli assault aircraft crews had been trained to fit an "active chemical or biological weapon within minutes of receiving the command to attack. The weapons are manufactured at the Institute for Biological Research in a suburb of Nes Zion."

The Big Lie Banned in America

September 7, 2002

The books by the French author Thierry Meyssan, which "challenge the official version of the Sept. 11 attacks," have been best-sellers in Europe. Their reception may be different in the United States, however, where they have been banned for being "anti-American."

Meyssan's two best-selling books, 9/11 – The Big Lie and Pentagate, refute "the entire official version of the Sept. 11 attacks," and will soon be available in the United States. The books have been extremely successful in Europe, selling more than 200,000 copies in France, but strong resistance and censorship suggest a different fate may await them in America.

I spoke with Patrick Pasin, the French publisher, who said that 70,000 copies have been printed and shipped to the United States. The books should be available by the end of September, he said. The on-line book store Amazon.com is already offering the books promising delivery in "three to five weeks".

Meyssan's books claim that a military faction in the U.S. government used remote control to guide two aircraft into the twin towers and that a U.S. cruise missile - not an American Airlines jet - smashed into the Pentagon. While thousands of articles about Meyssan's theories can be found on the Internet, only 2 articles have appeared in the U.S. mainstream media, and these have avoided engaging the substance of his arguments.

The cover of 9/11 – The Big Lie says the book "is based exclusively on documents published by the White House and the U.S. Dept. of Defense, as well as statements by American civilian and military leaders to the international press."

Pasin, the founder and director of the Carnot publishing house, said that while the books should be available to American readers by the end of September, many bookstores have said they will not carry the books because they are "anti-American." Even Amazon.com, the on-line book dealer, was criticized in the U.S. media with an article, "Amazon to sell anti-U.S. 911 book," Pasin said. While one of the English translations was ready in April, Pasin said he held off on releasing the books in America until after the anniversary of Sept. 11 because he "considered it was too early."

"We had to wait some time," Pasin said. "We don't want to provoke people. There is a lot of pain in many families - I share their pain."

Meyssan's controversial theories first appeared in March in a website in which he presented the video footage from a security camera at the Pentagon which shows an unidentified object striking the Pentagon and exploding in a white hot flash. Meyssan's site suggests that this object is a cruise missile, precisely as one eyewitness described it: "a cruise missile with wings", and challenges the viewers to examine the photos to "Find the Boeing."

The photos from the security camera are problematic because the object appears to be much smaller than the Boeing and the white hot flash seems to be more indicative of the impact of an explosive warhead - rather than a civilian aircraft - according to independent investigators.

"DISGUSTING" BOOKS

Pentagon spokesperson, Victoria Clarke, called Meyssan's books "disgusting." "There is no question," Clarke said, "there is no doubt what happened that day. And I think it's appalling that anyone might try to put out that kind of myth. I think it's also appalling for anyone to continue to give those sorts of people any kind of publicity."

FACTS, the largest Swiss-German news magazine, recently featured Meyssan's arguments and evidence in a cover story titled, "The Evil sits in the Pentagon." While a spokesman for FACTS said the article was "quite critical" of Meyssan's theories, the way in which the photographs and text are presented must raise serious questions in the mind of the reader.

I contacted Lt. Col. David Lapan at the Pentagon to ask about the photographs found in the FACTS article. Lapan said that the photos came from a Pentagon security camera video which CNN had "unofficially obtained." The photos had been "snuck out" of the Dept. of Defense and "leaked" to CNN, Lapan said. When asked to comment on the images, Lapan balked and requested that the photos be sent by e-mail. I promptly sent the images, easily obtained from the websites of CNN and other news networks, with relevant questions about what can be discerned from the images, their origin, and whether CNN had been reprimanded for divulging information that had been "unofficially obtained" from the Dept. of Defense.

"DoD did not release the security camera video," Lapan said, "contrary to what CNN claimed in their story. Video images related to the terrorist attack on the Pentagon had been turned over to law enforcement agencies as part of their investigation, he said, but the Pentagon is "not engaged in trying to determine who leaked the video/photos, nor has there been a reprimand."

While the events at the World Trade Center received greater attention than the crash in Washington, Meyssan focuses on attack on the Pentagon. While the official explanation is that the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 with its 64 passengers flew into the Pentagon, Meyssan says the object was a military cruise missile. The white-hot blast seen in the photographs, he says, indicates that the object striking the Pentagon resulted in a "detonation" of a high-explosive, rather than the less intense "deflagration" one would expect to see from a kerosene-laden jetliner striking the wall of a building.

Dorothea Hahn, the author of the article in FACTS, said that Meyssan "asks the right questions" but added that he is "very categorical" and selective about the information that he presents in order "to prove his theory." Although more than 200,000 copies of his book have been sold in France, the French media is "extremely critical of him," Hahn said.

"If Meyssan's theory is true, there must be hundreds of people involved in the conspiracy," Hahn said. "They would have started to talk by know." Hahn added that Flight 77 must have been destroyed somewhere else if it didn't crash into the Pentagon.

"WE NEED TO KNOW"

"We need to know what really happened," Hahn said. "What has been explained by the officials has too many contradictions and irregularities. Without a proper investigation, these conspiracy theories flourish."

"What I hope is that there will be a debate on what really happened and that opinion in the United States and the rest of the world is alerted," Meyssan said. "The U.S. government has chosen its scapegoats…But we cannot allow those who are really guilty to go unpunished and the innocent to be bombed."

Pasin wrote in a recent letter to Amazon, "As the publisher, from the beginning I had in mind all these innocent victims. For their memory, we must know; we cannot accept that the culprits remain unpunished, whoever they are. The books of Mr. Meyssan are our contribution, and I can assure you that I never felt anti-U.S. at all. On the contrary: we need a strong democracy in the United States of America."

The Seismic Evidence & Molten Iron in the Rubble

August 27, 2002

Two unexplained "spikes" in the seismic record from 9-11 indicate huge bursts of energy shook the ground beneath the World Trade Center's twin towers immediately prior to the collapse.

I have learned of pools of "molten steel" found at the base of the collapsed twin towers weeks after the collapse. Although the energy source for these incredibly hot areas has yet to be explained, New York seismometers recorded huge bursts of energy, which caused unexplained seismic "spikes" at the beginning of each collapse. These spikes suggest that massive underground explosions may have literally knocked the towers off their foundations, causing them to collapse.

In the basements of the collapsed towers, where the 47 central support columns connected with the bedrock, hot spots of "literally molten steel" were discovered more than a month after the collapse. Such persistent and intense residual heat, 70 feet below the surface, in an oxygen starved environment, could explain how these crucial structural supports failed.

Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction of Flushing, N.Y., told me that he saw pools of "literally molten steel" at the World Trade Center. Tully was contracted after 9-11 to remove the debris from the site. Tully called Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Md., for consultation about removing the debris. CDI calls itself "the innovator and global leader in the controlled demolition and implosion of structures."

Loizeaux, who cleaned up the bombed Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, arrived at the WTC site two days later and wrote the clean-up plan for the entire operation. I asked Loizeaux about the report of molten steel on the site.

"Yes," he said, "hot spots of molten steel in the basements." These incredibly hot areas were found "at the bottoms of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven [basement] levels," Loizeaux said. The molten steel was found "three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed," Loizeaux said. He said molten steel was also found at WTC 7, which collapsed mysteriously in the late afternoon. Construction steel has an extremely high melting point of about 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Asked what could have caused such extreme heat, Tully said, "Think of the jet fuel." Loizeaux said the steel-melting fires were fueled by "paper, carpet and other combustibles packed down the elevator shafts by the tower floors as they 'pancaked' into the basement."

However, some independent investigators dispute this claim, saying kerosene-based jet fuel, paper, or the other combustibles normally found in the towers, cannot generate the heat required to melt steel, especially in an oxygen-poor environment like a deep basement. Due to the lack of oxygen, paper and other combustibles packed down at the bottom of elevator shafts would probably be a smoky smoldering pile.

Experts disagree that jet-fuel or paper could generate such heat. This is impossible, they say, because the maximum temperature that can be reached by hydrocarbons like jet-fuel burning in air is 1,520 degrees F. Because the WTC fires were fuel rich, as evidenced by the thick black smoke, it is argued that they did not reach this upper limit. The hottest spots at the surface of the rubble, where abundant oxygen was available, were much cooler than the molten steel found in the basements.

Five days after the collapse, on Sept. 16, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) used an Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) to locate and measure the site's hot spots. Dozens of hot spots were mapped, the hottest being in the east corner of the South Tower where a temperature of 1,377 degrees F. was recorded. This is, however, less than half as hot at the molten steel in the basement.

The foundations of the twin towers were 70 feet deep. At that level, 47 huge box columns, connected to the bedrock, supported the entire gravity load of the structures. The steel walls of these lower box columns were four inches thick. Videos of the North Tower collapse show its communication mast falling first, indicating that the central support columns must have failed at the very beginning of the collapse. "Everything went simultaneously," Loizeaux said.

"At 10:29 the entire top section of the North Tower had been severed from the base and began falling down," he writes. "If the first event was the falling of a floor, how did that progress to the severing of hundreds of columns?"

Asked if the vertical support columns gave way before the connections between the floors and the columns, Ron Hamburger, a structural engineer with the FEMA assessment team said, "That's the $64,000 question."

Loizeaux said, "If I were to bring the towers down, I would put explosives in the basement to get the weight of the building to help collapse the structure."

SEISMIC 'SPIKES'

Seismographs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., 21 miles north of the WTC, recorded strange seismic activity on Sept. 11 that has still not been explained. While the aircraft crashes caused minimal earth shaking, significant earthquakes with unusual spikes occurred at the beginning of each collapse.

The Palisades seismic data recorded a 2.1 magnitude earthquake during the 10-second collapse of the South Tower at 9:59:04 and a 2.3 quake during the 8-second collapse of the North Tower at 10:28:31. However, the Palisades seismic record shows that—as the collapses began—a huge seismic "spike" marked the moment the greatest energy went into the ground. The strongest jolts were all registered at the beginning of the collapses, well before the falling debris struck the Earth.

These unexplained "spikes" in the seismic data lend credence to the theory that massive explosions at the base of the towers caused the collapses. A "sharp spike of short duration" is how seismologist Thorne Lay of University of California at Santa Cruz said an underground nuclear explosion appears on a seismograph.

The two unexplained spikes are more than 20 times the amplitude of the other seismic waves associated with the collapses and occurred in the East-West seismic recording as the buildings began to fall. Experts cannot explain why the seismic waves peaked before the towers actually hit the ground.

Asked about these spikes, seismologist Arthur Lerner-Lam, director of Columbia University's Center for Hazards and Risk Research said, "This is an element of current research and discussion. It is still being investigated." Lerner-Lam said that a 10-fold increase in wave amplitude indicates a 100-fold increase in energy released. These "short-period surface waves," reflect "the interaction between the ground and the building foundation," according to a report from Columbia Earth Institute.

"The seismic effects of the collapses are comparable to the explosions at a gasoline tank farm near Newark on Jan. 7, 1983," the Palisades Seismology Group reported on Sept. 14, 2001. One of the seismologists, Won-Young Kim, told me that the Palisades seismographs register daily underground explosions from a quarry 20 miles away. These blasts are caused by 80,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and cause local earthquakes between Magnitude 1 and 2.

Kim said the 1993 truck-bomb at the WTC did not register on the seismographs because it was "not coupled" to the ground. "Only a small fraction of the energy from the collapsing towers was converted into ground motion," Lerner-Lam said. "The ground shaking that resulted from the collapse of the towers was extremely small."

Last November, Lerner-Lam said: "During the collapse, most of the energy of the falling debris was absorbed by the towers and the neighboring structures, converting them into rubble and dust or causing other damage—but not causing significant ground shaking." Evidently, the energy source that shook the ground beneath the towers was many times more powerful than the total potential energy released by the falling mass of the towers. The question is: What was that energy source?

While steel is often tested for evidence of explosions, despite numerous eyewitness reports of explosions in the towers, the engineers involved in the FEMA-sponsored building assessment did no such tests. Dr. W. Gene Corley, who investigated for the government the cause of the fire at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing, headed the FEMA-sponsored engineering assessment of the WTC collapse.

Corley told me that while some tests had been done on the 80 pieces of steel saved from the site, he said he did not know about tests that show if an explosion had affected the steel. "I am not a metallurgist," Corley said.

Much of the structural steel from the WTC was sold to Alan D. Ratner of Metal Management of Newark, N.J., and the New York-based company Hugo Neu Schnitzer East. Ratner, who heads the New Jersey branch of the Chicago-based company, sold the WTC steel to overseas companies, reportedly selling more than 50,000 tons of steel to a Shanghai steel company known as Baosteel for $120 per ton. Ratner paid about $70 per ton for the steel. Other shipments of steel from the WTC went to India and other Asian ports. Ratner came to Metal Management after spending years with a metal trading firm known as SimsMetal based out of Sydney, Australia.

Open Letter to 9-11 Investigators

August 24, 2002

The evidence is now compelling — the twin towers were blown off their feet. The plane crashes and fires were but secondary distractions to the main event. The towers were literally "blasted" off their footings at the beginning, and during the first phase, of their respective collapses. The fact that the towers were seen "jumping" immediately before the collapse is documented on film by a helicopter camera that witnessed that event.

Massive explosions deep in the basements of the WTC towers clearly lifted — and dropped — the massive structures from their bases 70 feet below the surface. The basement explosions that detached the central support columns from the bedrock, and dropped the towers, left extremely hot pools of molten steel (1535+ degrees Celsius), which persisted for days in the lowest basements (-7 level), and clear seismic tracks — that have yet to be explained.

However, the seismic evidence is quite clear: There were massive (and unexplained) releases of energy causing 2.1 and 2.3 magnitude earthquakes before any debris even hit the ground. Furthermore, seismologists agree that the falling rubble would only cause minimal seismic disturbances, which is what the seismic record clearly shows it did (e.g., Columbia University's Arthur Lerner-Lam's reports).

As a matter of fact, the impact of the "rubble" (we can no longer speak of large pieces) caused only relatively minor seismic shock wave signatures compared to what rocked the Earth (2.1 and 2.3 earthquakes) at the towers' base from the beginning of the collapse until about 5 seconds into the 8- and 10-second collapses.

The massive seismic wave "spike", which occurred at about 4-5 seconds into the 8-second collapse of the North Tower was many times larger than the waves that marked the moment of impact when the "rubble" finally hit the ground.

DROP THE COVER-UP

Investigators: The cat is out of the bag. The game is up. The evidence is now overwhelming and compelling. Scientists who continue to obfuscate and refuse to investigate the clear evidence of explosions in the towers will undoubtedly be considered by honest investigators, the public, and history to be part of the cover-up. The steel evidence must be tested for signs of "twinning", the tracks left in steel of exposure to high-energy explosions. All steel from the basements must be tested for such twinning as well as for radioactivity.

I, for one, would not want to be in the position of being involved in the criminal cover-up of this horrendous mass murder. Those investigators who participate in the cover-up, whether actively or passively, whether by action or inaction, should expect to find themselves branded as quislings, of both their nation and their science.

The only sure path is to pursue the truth, wherever it may lead.

Foreign Firms Destroyed Crucial Evidence

August 14, 2002

Why did a foreign company - headed by a knight of the British Empire - manage the controversial "clean-up" of the rubble at the World Trade center and the Pentagon? Although the terror attacks of 9-11 were clearly criminal acts of mass murder, no effort was made to preserve the integrity of the crime scenes and the essential evidence was disposed of like garbage.

The editor-in-chief of Fire Engineering magazine, William A. Manning, issued an urgent "call to action" to America's firefighters at the end of 2001, calling for a forensic investigation and demanding that the steel from the site be preserved to allow investigators to determine what caused the collapse. "Such destruction of evidence," Manning said, "shows the astounding ignorance of government officials to the value of a thorough, scientific investigation of the largest fire-induced collapse in world history."

"I have combed through our national standard for fire investigation, NFPA 921, but nowhere does one find an exemption allowing the destruction of evidence for buildings over 10 stories tall," Manning said. "Clearly, there are burning questions that need answers. Based on the incident's magnitude alone, a full-throttle, fully resourced, forensic investigation is imperative."

Three months later, the Science Committee of the House of Representatives reported that the WTC investigation was "hampered" by the destruction of crucial evidence. The committee report of March 6 says, "Some of the critical pieces of steel...were gone before the first investigator ever reached the site." The investigation Manning called for never happened and never will, because the essential evidence is now destroyed.

"The FEMA-sponsored building performance assessment currently being conducted of the World Trade Center is just that: an assessment, not an investigation," Prof. Glenn Corbett of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City told the Science Committee in March. Corbett had previously called the FEMA-led investigation "uncoordinated" and "superficial." "You would think we would have the largest fire investigation in world history. You would be wrong," Corbett wrote. "We are literally treating the steel removed from the site like garbage, not like crucial fire scene evidence."

WHO'S IN CHARGE?

The New York Times was unable to find out who was behind the destruction of evidence. On Dec. 25, 2001, the Times reported, "Officials in the mayor's office declined to reply to written and oral requests for comment over a three-day period about who decided to recycle the steel and the concern that the decision might he handicapping the investigation."

"I must say that the current investigation - some would argue that 'review' is the more appropriate word - seems to be shrouded in excessive secrecy," said Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.). "There are no clear lines of authority," he said. "No one is in charge."

Before the dust had settled on Sept.11, the mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani, and Kenneth Holden of the city's Dept. of Design and Construction (DDC), contracted 4 major construction management companies to begin the removal of the debris from the World Trade Center. Three of the four major companies involved in the clean-up were foreign owned: AMEC, Bovis Lend Lease, both headquartered in London; and Turner, a subsidiary of Germany's Hochtief. Only Tully Construction of Flushing, N.Y., is a truly American-owned company.

Peter Tully, president of the company, was the only contractor willing to speak openly with me about his work at the WTC site. "I was there every day," Tully said. "The mayor's office and DDC called us on Sept. 11...on the site we had at least three meetings a day with Ken Holden and Mike Burton."

The WTC site was initially divided into four quadrants and Tully Construction was assigned to Quadrant 3. Tully said his company had worked on the South Tower, WTC 4 and 5, and the 425,000 square foot underground retail mall.

'EVERYTHING WAS PULVERIZED'

"Think of the thousands of file cabinets, computers, and telephones in those towers - I never saw one - everything was pulverized," he said. "Everything that was above grade - above the 6th and 7th floor - disintegrated...it was like an explosion." Tully Construction specializes in concrete. I asked Mr. Tully if he had ever seen concrete pulverized as it was at the WTC.

"No - never," he said.

Tully said that there were hot spots where he observed "literally molten steel." Asked about what could have caused such intense heat, Tully said, "Think about the jet fuel."

BRITISH MANAGEMENT

The London-based firm AMEC, ranked by Engineering News-Record magazine as "the world's largest firm," oversaw the actual management of the debris removal at both the Pentagon and the WTC. "AMEC was the only construction company working at both disaster sites," the company's web site says. "AMEC is managing Hudson River barging operations to transport the rubble from the entire WTC site to a landfill on Staten Island and to steel recycling operations in New Jersey."

AMEC had just finished the renovation at the Pentagon when it was called to manage the removal of debris there and at the World Trade Center. "AMEC was placed in charge by the City of New York of organizing and engineering the around-the-clock clean up operation in the northwest sector," the web site says, which included the North Tower and WTC 6 (U.S. Customs House). The company also cleaned up the 47-story WTC 7, which mysteriously collapsed late in the afternoon of 9-11.

AMEC co-managed the WTC site with another London-based firm, Bovis Lend Lease, from January 2002. Bovis was a somewhat troubled construction subsidiary of Britain's P&O. Bovis was acquired by Australia's Lend Lease Corp in 1999. Bovis is headed by Sir Frank Lampl, a Czechoslovakian who immigrated to England at age 42. Lampl, who claims to have been imprisoned in Auschwitz and Dachau during the Nazi era, has become a British knight.

I spoke with Mary Costello, spokesperson for Bovis in New York. Costello said the company had assumed "overall responsibility" for the WTC site on Jan 4. She didn't want to discuss what buildings Bovis had worked on and said, "You should not be contacting us. You should be speaking to DDC." Calls to DDC public affairs department are neither answered nor returned.

Turner Construction, the third foreign firm, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hochtief AG, headquartered in Essen, Germany.

AMEC & THE PENTAGON

AMEC is an "informal acronym" for Asset Management and Engineering Consultancy, according to the firm's communications director David Paterson. Paterson told me that oil and gas extraction provides 25 percent of the company's revenue. AMEC operates the North Sea oil rigs for Shell and British Petroleum, he said.

AMEC had just completed a project to strengthen and renovate a section of the Pentagon. Wedge 1, when the building was attacked. The damaged area is between Wedges 1 and 2. Marcella Diaz, communication director for the firm's U.S. subsidiary, AMEC Construction Management, told me that the company's work in the Pentagon had been completed on the Friday just before Tuesday, Sept. 11.

Paterson said that AMEC is the "prime contractor for the U.S. Dept of Defense on environmental work." The firm was paid some $752 million for its 2-year renovation and clean-up at the Pentagon, according to Rachel Decker, spokesperson for the Pentagon's renovation entity known as PENREN. The fact that a British firm had been given the contract to renovate the Pentagon was "not a problem," Decker said.

Asked about who was in charge of the clean-up at the WTC, Paterson said, "The City of New York was the project manager." The director of DDC, Kenneth Holden, was named as the person in charge at the site according to Paterson. AMEC is in line for further construction work at both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center according to the Daily Mail, a British newspaper.

The company's London-based chief executive, Sir Peter Mason, said about the Pentagon clean-up: "The target is to have it reopened for business by Sept. 11, 2003, as a point of principle." Mason is a knight of the British Empire.

The former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, who gave the management of the WTC site to the two British firms, AMEC and Bovis Lend Lease, received an honorary knighthood in the Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II on 13 February 2002. When Jiuliani was made a knight of the British Empire he joined an exclusive club which includes George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Colin Powell, Wesley Clark, Norman Schwarzkopf, and Steven Spielberg. Bush and Reagan are also both knights in the Order of the Bath.

Firefighters' Final Words Debunk Fire Collapse Theory

August 7, 2002

Evidence that debunks the official explanation for the collapse of the World Trade Center is being kept secret by the Department of Justice on a flimsy pretext. The Department of Justice has ordered secrecy measures to keep the contents of a "lost tape" of firefighters' voices at the World Trade Center from being made public. The 78-minute audiotape evidently debunks the accepted explanation that intense jet fuel fires melted the towers' steel beams and caused the collapses.

The New York Times recently revealed the existence of the tape of radio transmissions between firefighters of the New York Fire Department (NYFD), which proves that "at least two men" had reached the 78th floor Sky Lobby of the South Tower. The firefighters had reported about the fires and casualties they encountered and had begun evacuating the survivors. The article said that firefighters "reached the crash zone on the 78th floor, where they went to the aid of grievously injured people trapped in a sprawl of destruction." While the article raises as many questions as it answers, it points to a reason for the secrecy: "Once they got there," the article says, "they had a coherent plan for putting out the fires they could see and helping victims who survived."

The report names two of the firefighters who were at the crash site: Battalion Chief Orio J. Palmer, who was organizing the evacuation of injured people, and Fire Marshal Ronald P. Bucca. Both were among the 343 firefighters who perished. The voices of the firefighters "showed no panic, no sense that events were racing beyond their control," the Times wrote. "At that point, the building would be standing for just a few more minutes, as the fire was weakening the structure on the floors above him. Even so, Chief Palmer could see only two pockets of fire, and called for a pair of engine companies to fight them."

The fact that veteran firefighters had "a coherent plan for putting out" the "two pockets of fire" indicates they judged the blazes to be manageable. These reports from the scene of the crash provide crucial evidence debunking the government's claim that a raging steel-melting inferno led to the tower's collapse. As the FEMA "Building Performance Assessment" report says, "Temperatures may have been as high as 900-1,100 degrees Celsius (1,700-2,000 Fahrenheit) in some areas."

"If FEMA's temperature estimates are correct, the interiors of the towers were furnaces capable of casting aluminum and glazing pottery," Eric Hufschmid, author of the book Painful Questions writes. Yet the voices on the tape prove that several firefighters were able to work "without fear" for an extended period at the point of the crash, and that the fires they encountered there were neither intense nor large.

The South Tower disintegrated in less than an hour after being hit by a plane, which impacted between its 78th and 84th floors. "Fire has never caused a steel building to collapse," he writes. "So how did a 56-minute fire bring down a steel building as strong as the South Tower?" His forthcoming book presents compelling evidence that explosives caused the towers to collapse.

Pointing to the Meridian Plaza fire in Philadelphia in 1991, he wrote, "The Meridian Plaza fire was extreme, but it did not cause the building to collapse. The fire in the South Tower seems insignificant by comparison to both the Meridian Plaza fire and the fire in the North Tower. How could the tiny fire in the South Tower cause the entire structure to shatter into dust after 56 minutes while much more extreme fires did not cause the Meridian Plaza building to even crack into two pieces?"

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PA), the bi-state authority and owner of the World Trade Center, retrieved the "lost tape." A spokesman for the authority, Greg Trevor, told me that the tape was found in PA police offices at 5 WTC, "two or three weeks" after 9-11. The PA police monitored radio transmissions from the WTC. Because of an unexplained delay in producing the tape, it was believed "for months" that firefighters had gone no higher than about the 50th floor in each tower. The delay, Trevor said, was due to the time required to transfer the voice data to "encrypted CDs."

In January or February, the PA offered a copy of the tape to NYFD officials, who reportedly declined the offer because they did not want to sign the confidentiality agreement as demanded by the PA. The Independent (U.K.) added that the PA "held back from sharing it with police and only relinquished it on condition that a confidentiality agreement was signed."

"That's not correct," Trevor said, regarding the allegation that the PA had withheld the tape from the police. The PA had only handled the tape "under the instruction of the U.S. attorney's office," he said.

Spokesman Bernard Gifford said NYPD had not pursued a criminal investigation of 9-11, having "turned it over" to the FBI. Gifford wouldn't say when this occurred, although Joe Valiquette of the New York office of the FBI told me that the federal bureau had run the investigation "from the moment it happened."

On Aug. 2 the relatives of the 16 firefighters whose voices were identified on the tape were allowed to hear their last words in a New York City hotel. The families were first required to sign a statement prepared by lawyers that they would not disclose what was said on the tape. Despite the fact that the contents of the tape are being kept secret, the Times article says, "Only now, nearly a year after the attacks, are the efforts of Chief Palmer, Mr. Bucca and others becoming public. City fire officials simply delayed listening to a 78-minute tape that is the only known recording of firefighters inside the towers."

While Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said he had not known the tape existed until "very recently," both the Times and CNN err in claiming that the NYFD is the agency behind the extreme secrecy. "The Fire Department has forbidden anyone to discuss the contents publicly on the ground that the tape might be evidence in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the man accused of plotting with the hijackers," the Times said.

When I asked the NYFD why the only conversations between firefighters engaged at the scene of the crash had to be kept secret because of Moussaoui, who was in prison in Minnesota at the time, the spokesman replied, "Take it up with the Department of Justice."

Asked about the numerous reports by eyewitnesses, including firefighters, of explosions inside the towers before they collapsed, Mike Logrin, spokesman for the NYFD, said, "We're pretty sure there weren't bombs in the building."

On Sept. 11 the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) interviewed one of its New York-based reporters, Steve Evans, who was in the second tower when it was hit. "I was at the base of the second tower, the second tower that was hit," Evans said. "There was an explosion—I didn't think it was an explosion—but the base of the building shook. I felt it shake . . . then when we were outside, the second explosion happened and then there was a series of explosions. . . . We can only wonder at the kind of damage—the kind of human damage—which was caused by those explosions—those series of explosions," he said.

Evans is a professional journalist and although his observations of explosions in the second tower should be taken into account, they are not. Numerous eyewitnesses reported also seeing or hearing explosions. Valiquette of the FBI told me that he had not "heard anything" about reports of explosions in the building and that he had "never heard any discussion of it" in the FBI's New York office.

9-11 Terror Suspect Hiding in Israel

July 31, 2002

The Israeli owner of the Mossad "front" company who fled to Israel after his "movers" were caught filming the World Trade Center attacks remains at large although the FBI, which has an office in Tel Aviv, has his name on its terror suspect list.

A leaked "FBI Suspect List" circulated among financial institutions in Italy shows that Dominik Suter, the Israeli owner of Urban Moving Systems who fled in haste to Israel after 9-11, is among those suspected of being behind the terror attacks. Despite the presence of an FBI office in Tel Aviv and the "intimate relationship" between U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies, Suter apparently remains out-of-reach. The suspect list is classified "Law Enforcement Sensitive" and is periodically updated. The list published on an Italian website was dated 22 May 2002 and was accompanied by two documents from February: an explanatory letter from the Italian state agency engaged in fighting money laundering, the Ufficio Italiano dei Cambi, and a distribution list from Assifact, an Italian association for factoring. A factoring company finances accounts of businesses. "If we deal with anybody on this list, we are obliged to notify the authorities," Liliana Corti of the Milano-based Assifact told me.

While Dominik Suter's name is on the list, oddly his Israeli nationality is not. Three addresses, two in New Jersey and one in Sherman Oaks, California, are given, as is his Social Security number. The year 1970 is provided for his date of birth. When I asked the FBI about the list, a spokeswoman said, "We're not going to validate your questions by talking about the list. You are not supposed to have it. It is not for public consumption." Asked about Israeli cooperation regarding suspects being harbored in the state of Israel, Bill Carter, Unit Chief of the FBI's National Press Office in Washington, said Israel was "under no obligation" to turn over suspects and that it did so only as a "matter of good will."

Carter told me to contact the FBI office in Tel Aviv for information regarding any extradition request for Suter. Robert Geeslin, an FBI agent, is the "deputy legal attaché" and has an office in the U.S. Embassy in Israel. Geeslin's office, however, refused to discuss the matter.

I then spoke with Mark Regev, spokesman for the Israeli government in Washington. Regev said the U.S. and Israeli authorities have "an intimate relationship" that is "excellent" and "on-going." The "close cooperation" between Israel and the U.S. includes sharing intelligence information. While I repeatedly asked Regev if Israeli authorities would cooperate by apprehending a terror suspect for questioning by the FBI, three times Regev avoided answering the question.

The first week after 9-11, I wrote about the 5 exuberant Israelis seen celebrating while filming the attacks on the World Trade Center. Although the men claimed to be movers working for the New Jersey-based Urban Moving Systems, it soon became clear that they were actually Israeli intelligence agents. One of the men later said, "Our purpose was to document the event."

Forward, a respected Jewish newspaper in New York, reported in March 2002 that the five Israelis were "conducting a Mossad surveillance mission." The men had first been observed exulting while filming the attacks on the WTC from the roof of a white moving van in the parking lot of a New Jersey apartment building across the river from lower Manhattan. "They seemed to be taking a movie," the resident who noticed them said. The men were taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background, she said. What struck her were the expressions on the men's faces. "They were like happy, you know … they didn't look shocked to me. I thought it was very strange," she said.

The moving van belonged to a front company called Urban Moving Systems. Around 4 p.m. on Sept. 11, the van was pulled over, and five Israelis: Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari, all Israelis between 22 and 27 years old, were arrested at gunpoint. One had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock while another carried two foreign passports. Box cutters were found in the van. One of the Israeli agents spoke on an Israeli television show after being deported, saying, "The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event."

Yaron Shmuel

Oded Ellner

Omer Marmari

The case was turned over to the FBI's Foreign Counterintelligence Section after the names of two of the five Israelis showed up on a CIA-FBI database of foreign intelligence operatives. At that point, he said, the bureau took control of the investigation and launched a Foreign Counterintelligence Investigation, or FCI, because the FBI believed Urban Moving Systems was a cover for an Israeli intelligence operation. "An FCI means not only that it was serious but also that it was handled at a very high level and very tightly," a former official told Forward. "The FBI came to the conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front," Forward reported on March 15.

While the FBI searched the company's Weehawken, N.J., offices, removing boxes of documents and a dozen computer hard drives, the Israeli owner of the company, Dominik Otto Suter, was allowed to quickly flee the country. After one brief interview, FBI agents tried to interview Suter only to discover that he had cleared out of his New Jersey home and fled to Israel. Authorities confirmed that Urban Moving Systems was a Mossad front, whose "main office" was nothing but a mailbox address in midtown Manhattan. ABC News reporters visited the company's New Jersey warehouse saying, "It looked as if it had been shut down in a big hurry. Cell phones were lying around; office phones were still connected; and the property of dozens of clients remained in the warehouse." The state of New Jersey seized the property and has a lawsuit pending against Urban Moving Systems and Suter, an Israeli citizen.

The Israelis had been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, for overstaying their tourist visas and working in the United States illegally. Two weeks after their arrest, an immigration judge ordered them to be deported, however, however, FBI and CIA officials in Washington put a hold on the case. The five Israeli agents were held in detention for more than two months while some were held in solitary confinement for 40 days and given as many as seven lie-detector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul Kurzberg, refused to take a lie-detector test for 10 weeks and then failed it, according to his lawyer. After 71 days in jail, a deal was struck between Israeli and U.S. government officials and the five Israeli spies were put on a plane and deported to Israel on November 20.

What Exploded at WTC 6?

July 12, 2002

There has been some confusion about when the CNN video showing the mysterious explosion of 9-11 was filmed. In order to clarify the timing, I contacted CNN archives in Atlanta. The most senior archivist available, who could only reveal his first name, Andy, said that the footage showing the mysterious explosion had been shot as the second plane crashed into the South Tower, about 9:04 a.m.

There has been some doubt about the large amount of smoke seen around the south tower in the background. Most television viewers did not see the debris and smoke that fell around the South Tower after the plane crashed because tall buildings were in the way. A series of photos by Carmen Taylor, however, show that the amount of smoke and debris, and the way that if fell, match the image from CNN, which is taken from the opposite side of the towers.

Carmen Taylor of Lavaca, Ark., was visiting New York City and caught on film the moment United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center. Taylor was vacationing in New York when she spotted an airplane flying toward the World Trade Center, which had been struck by another plane minutes earlier. The second plane struck the Trade Center's second tower, and Taylor captured the event in an astonishing series of digital photographs that aired on the local ABC affiliate, Channel 40/29.

Taylor was just about to board the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty when the first explosion happened. She turned her camera on, and started shooting. As she did, she caught the explosions after the first plane struck. Then, she captured the second plane just before it hit the tower.

"There had been helicopters circling," Taylor said. "And then, this big plane comes up, and I thought 'OK, there's a plane going by.' Within seconds, it went straight into the other tower. "We were just standing, looking at the World Trade Center, and all of a sudden, it lit up like massive fireworks," she said.

What Caused the WTC 6 Crater?

July 10, 2002

Before the smoke had cleared from around the stricken South Tower, a mysterious explosion shot 550 feet into the air above the U.S. Customs House at 6 World Trade Center. This unexplained blast at the Customs House has never been investigated or reported in the mainstream media.

Despite the fact that the horrible events of September 11 occurred in broad daylight and were widely photographed, significant aspects of the attacks have been completely suppressed by a media blackout. A massive explosion, witnessed by millions of television viewers on CNN, evidently devastated WTC 6, the 8-story U.S. Customs House, although no national newspaper or media outlet has said a word about it.

The unexplained blast occurred between the burning North Tower and the 47-story Salomon Brothers Building, known as WTC 7, immediately after United Airlines Flight 175 smashed into the South Tower, at about 9:03 a.m. The explosion at WTC 6 was shown afterwards on CNN. Because it not broadcast as it happened there has been some confusion about when it actually occurred. The large amount of smoke seen cascading around the South Tower in the video led some observers to mistake the blast for a dust cloud from the subsequent collapse of the tower.

TIMING CONFIRMED

I contacted CNN to determine exactly when the footage was filmed. CNN's Public Affairs Department confirmed that the explosion shown in the footage occurred immediately after the second plane had crashed into the South Tower. When asked if the footage was taken at 9:04 a.m., the CNN archivist who could not give his last name, said, "That's correct." When asked if CNN could offer any explanation about what might have caused the blast that clearly reached 550 feet, soaring higher than the 47-story WTC 7 in the foreground, the archivist said, "We can't figure it out."

The affected space between WTC 7 and the North Tower was occupied by the 8-story U.S. Customs House building, also known as WTC 6. The building primarily housed the offices of some 760 employees of the Customs Service, a department of the U.S. Treasury. A number of other federal agencies reportedly had offices in the building, including the Departments of Commerce, Agriculture, Labor, and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms, although the agencies failed to return calls about the matter. A spokesman for the Export-Import Bank of the U.S., which had an office with 4 employees on the 6th floor of the Customs House did confirm the time of the explosion and said the employees had survived and been relocated to another location in the city. One private company, Eastco Building Services, Inc., reportedly leased space in the building.

Some 800 workers from WTC 6 were safely evacuated within 12 minutes of the first plane hitting the North Tower at about 8:46 a.m., according to a Washington Post article by Stephen Barr, "Knowing the Drill Saved Lives at New York's Customs House" dated 18 September 2001. The Barr piece is the only known article published about WTC 6, however, Barr failed to mention the explosion that apparently devastated the building just minutes after the workers had escaped with their lives.

AVOIDING THE SUBJECT

Although the Customs House apparently exploded at 9:04 a.m., the government-sponsored investigation was steered away from looking into what had actually happened. The Federal Emergency Management Agency funded an investigation by the American Society of Civil Engineers, however, investigators were reportedly blocked from the building by an order from the New York City's Dept. of Design and Construction (DDC). Kenneth Holden is Commissioner of the DDC, having been appointed by the former mayor, Rudolph Giuliani on December 7, 1999.

Regarding the investigation of WTC 4, 5, and 6, FEMA's "Building Performance" report says, "WTC 5 was the only building accessible for observation," but it adds, "The observations, findings, and recommendations are assumed to be applicable to all three buildings." A spokesman for FEMA told me that because the building was considered by DDC to be "very dangerous," there was "no data collection" from WTC 6. Dr. Gene Corley, one of the engineers who led the investigation, told me that concerns about loose gold bullion and cash prevented investigators from entering WTC 4.

The FEMA report says, "The buildings [4,5,6] responded as expected to the impact loadings." Although the report says, "most of the central part of WTC 6 suffered collapse on all floors" it adds, "damage was consistent with the observed impact load." The Customs House had a huge crater in its center.

"INTERESTING PHOTOS"

I contacted Corley about the CNN photos. Corley said he had not seen the photos before and said, "These are interesting photos." Corley, like others, thought the damage at WTC 6 was caused by the collapse of the North Tower, however, not one of the experts could recall seeing the CNN footage before. A spokesman for the Customs Service said, "It did not blow up. When the tower collapsed it caved in."

Corley said he had not seen the photos of the extremely high-speed missile-like object seen streaking toward WTC 6 from behind the North Tower as the second plane impacted the South Tower. He noted that parts of the plane's landing gear and an engine passed through the South Tower, and landed several blocks away. These objects, however, had a distinctly different trajectory from the streaking missile-like object. Jonathan Barnett, another investigator that I spoke to, said, "The debris from Tower 2 hit Building 5, not 6."

Video Evidence of Unexplained Explosion in WTC 6

July 2, 2002

Images of unidentified aircraft and missiles photographed during the attack on the World Trade Center suggest that 9-11 was the "highly planned, covert, special-operation," which some astute observers have claimed from the beginning.

The awful moment when United Airlines Flight 175 smashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center is an event captured on film and videotape from many angles. Among the archive of photographic and video evidence are distinct images of unidentified aircraft and missiles that appear to have played significant roles in the attack. The fact that the leading federal agencies involved in the criminal investigation of 9-11 deny any knowledge of these photographs lends credence to those who maintain the attack was "a domestic, covert, special operation."

Although millions of people have watched on video the horrible spectacle of the second hijacked plane plunging into the smooth facade of the south tower, very few have seen the mysterious white aircraft that accompanied it on a nearby parallel path slightly to the north. While viewers' attention was focused on the crash and subsequent fireball, few noticed the missile streaking toward 6 and WTC 7 at the edge of the screen. The blurred streak that appeared from behind the smoking north tower disappeared in the wink of an eye into the lower right hand corner of the screen.

Frame-by-frame analysis of that video shows what appears to be an incredibly fast streaking missile, headed toward 6 or WTC 7, at the precise moment the plane exploded in the south tower. Six WTC was an 8-story building, which was left with a huge unexplained crater at its center while WTC 7 burned and collapsed late in the afternoon on 9-11, for no apparent reason. Fire engineers are baffled as to what caused the 47-story building, built by Larry Silverstein in 1987, to collapse.

"Even though Building 7 didn't get much attention in the media immediately, within the structural engineering community, it's considered to be much more important to understand," said William F. Baker, a partner in charge of structural engineering at the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. "They say, 'We know what happened at 1 and 2, but why did 7 come down?'"

"EVAPORATED" STEEL BEAMS

Sections of the steel beams in WTC 7 seem to have "evaporated", according to a New York Times article of November 29, 2001. "A combination of an uncontrolled fire and the structural damage might have been able to bring the building down, some engineers said. But that would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated in extraordinarily high temperatures, Dr. Jonathan Barnett said."

Engineers are investigating whether intensely hot fires resulted from thousands of gallons of diesel fuel stored in the building. While one tank held 6,000 gallons of fuel to power the mayor's command bunker on the 23rd floor, another set of four tanks held as much as 36,000 gallons just below ground level on the building's southwest side for emergency generators. "The fuel absolutely could be a factor," said Silvian Marcus, executive vice president for the Cantor Seinuk Group and a structural engineer involved in the original design of the building, which was completed in 1987. But he added, "The tanks may have accelerated the collapse, but did not cause the collapse."

Two firefighters, Deputy Chief James Jackson and Battalion Chief Blaich, said that the southwest corner of WTC 7 near the fuel tank was severely damaged and that the tanks might have been breached. Jackson said that about an hour before the building's collapse, heavy black smoke, consistent with a fuel fire of some sort, was coming from that part of the building.

DID A "BUNKER BUSTER" MISSILE HIT WTC 7?

The streaking missile seen in the video could have pierced the heavy masonry that protected the diesel storage tanks. The missile is obviously traveling extremely fast, at an estimated 5,000 feet per second (3,400 mph). The U.S. military has a LOSAT (line-of-sight anti-tank) missile that travels that fast with a range of 4 miles that can be guided by laser or Global Positioning technology. The LOSAT Kinetic Energy Missile uses its velocity rather than explosives to destroy tanks, buildings, and bunkers. No other military is known to have such a missile.

In the WTC video the black streaking object travels an estimated 1,000 feet in the space of 4 frames, each frame taking 1/30 of a second. Although a video might not capture an image of the missile, experts say the rapidly dissipating exhaust of a LOSAT can be captured on film if the lighting, angle and background conditions are suitable.

I asked Matthew Heyman of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the agency investigating the structural collapses at the World Trade Center, if the investigation would examine the photographic evidence of a missile and the crater in 6-WTC. "Yes", Heyman said, but only if evidence of a missile is presented, adding that the 2-year investigation will only study the collapses of the twin towers and WTC 7.

Although numerous images of unidentified aircraft and missiles are accessible in the public archive of WTC video footage and have been scrutinized frame-by-frame by Internet sleuths, federal investigators and the mainstream media pretend to be completely ignorant of their existence. Spokesmen for the federal agencies engaged in the 9-11 investigation all feigned ignorance of the aforementioned video images when contacted by this reporter on July 1, 2002.

When I asked James Margolin, spokesman for the New York City office of the FBI, about the video images of unidentified planes and missiles on Sept. 11, Margolin said, "It's the first I've heard." William Shumann, spokesman for the FAA said, "I'm not aware of any such videos." When asked about the radar tapes that could have recorded such objects, Shumann said, "We're not saying anything." The 9-11 radar tapes from New York City had been turned over to the FBI, Shumann said.

Denial of the existence of these photographs by the federal agencies at the forefront of the 9-11 criminal investigation is troubling because it indicates an inability to respond to evidence that has been in the public domain since September 11. It is incredulous that the FBI and FAA are denying knowledge of photographic evidence, which has been openly published and discussed in the Japanese mass media.

"A DOMESTIC COVERT OPERATION"

The agencies' denial of this evidence supports the unconventional thesis of political observers such as Lyndon LaRouche, who was interviewed by Jack Stockwell of KTKK-AM ("K-Talk") in Salt Lake City as the horror of September 11 unfolded. Before either tower had collapsed, LaRouche said: "Well, largely, this is a domestic covert operation, which we had word of beforehand." Shortly after the south tower collapsed, LaRouche said, "This is obviously a highly planned attack by a very capable agency." LaRouche rejected that the attacks were "an Islamic national operation" saying they lacked the capability. Instead he blamed "people who want the U.S. to go to war against the Arab world."

"It's a geopolitical provocation!" LaRouche said. "It's run by people whose intentions coincide with those of some of the wildest people in the Israeli Defense Forces. People who have the ability to play that kind of game inside the United States."

"Somebody obviously intended to enrage the U.S. into going in full-force in support of a launching of the Israeli Defense Forces against neighboring Arab nations," he said.

The next day, LaRouche told listeners of Woody Woodland on New Hampshire's WGIR: "This is not a terrorist operation. This is a covert, strategic, special-operations operation, which has characteristic similarities to the militia operation against the Oklahoma City center some years ago."

Woodland asked, "Are you saying that this might have been some people within our own country?"

LaRouche said: "In part, it had to be people within our own country … it was primarily a domestic, covert, special operation, by people with very high-grade military special-operations backgrounds. It could not have happened otherwise."

BBC Reported "Series of Explosions" in Twin Towers on 9-11

June 28, 2002

The government investigators who will conduct an investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings held a "public meeting" at the Eastside Marriott in New York City on June 24 to listen to experts and gather input on the planned forensic inquiry. The investigative body, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), whose director was appointed by President George W. Bush, was assigned by the president to conduct a "fact-finding" investigation into the causes of the collapse with a view to making high-rise buildings safer. The NIST investigators will report to Secretary of Commerce Don Evans, one of Bush's closest friends and his former campaign finance chairman.

One must wonder at the integrity of an investigation, which fails to even address one of the most obvious causes of structural degradation of the towers before the collapse: major explosions and even "series of explosions" witnessed by survivors from the towers. During the 8-hour NIST meeting there was not a single mention of the numerous eyewitness reports of "bombs," "heavy-duty explosions," or "series of explosions" prior to and during the collapse of the twin towers.

Fire fighters, workers, journalists, and people in the street all reported seeing explosions unrelated to the crashed planes in the upper parts of the towers, but this important evidence has been omitted from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) report which was released in April, and upon which the NIST investigation will be based. FEMA's failure to use eyewitness testimony has been severely criticized by the organizations of the relatives of the victims. FEMA's director, Joseph Allbaugh, is a close friend of the president as well. It was during the FEMA-run "investigation" that most of the physical evidence from the tower's was destroyed and recycled. Much of the structural steel was reportedly sent to China and "mob-run" junkyards, according to New York City police.

While eyewitness reports of bombs and explosions in the towers have evidently been censored within the American mass media, there was a flurry of reports from European news sources on September 11 that described major explosions occurring long after the buildings had been struck by the planes.

On September 11, eight hours after the towers were hit, the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) interviewed one of its New York-based reporters, Steve Evans, who was in the second tower when it was hit. Evans was asked what he had seen: "Its more what I felt really," Evans said. "I was at the base of the 2nd tower, the second tower that was hit. There was an explosion – I didn't think it was an explosion – but the base of the building shook. I felt it shake … then when we were outside, the second explosion happened and then there was a series of explosions…" At this point the London news anchor cuts Evans off in mid-sentence with a question rather than listen to Evans continue to describe the "series of explosions" that he saw and felt. Evans' voice was turned down.

In a minute, however, Evans returns to the "series of explosions" that he witnessed: "We can only wonder at the kind of damage – the kind of human damage – which was caused by those explosions – those series of explosions," Evans said. Evans is a professional journalist and his observations of explosions in the second tower need to be taken into account by anybody looking into the cause of the catastrophe of September 11. Many eyewitnesses have reported similar explosions, but these reports, and what they suggest, are intentionally being censored and avoided by the very people who are supposed to be investigating the cause of the collapses.

Video Evidence of 9-11 Explosions Censored

June 28, 2002

Video footage and photographs from 9-11 have been suppressed to prevent Americans from seeing and hearing evidence of unexplained explosions at the World Trade Center.

Although the terror attacks in New York and Washington of 9-11 occurred in broad daylight and were seen by millions around the world via television, heavy-handed media censorship has suppressed video footage that challenged the official version of events. European news networks have video footage and photos that indicate explosions occurred within the twin towers of the World Trade Center before and during the collapses. This evidence, however, is being suppressed and ignored by the U.S. media and government agencies supposedly investigating the causes of the towers' structural failures.

Relatives and fire engineering experts recently acknowledged the censorship and called on the government to allow the investigators to "review" the "essential" video and photographic evidence during a public meeting. The meeting held in New York City on June 24, was to "gather comments and suggestions" as a preliminary step for the "fact-finding" investigation planned by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

President George W. Bush asked NIST to conduct an investigation into the collapse of the WTC buildings. Dr. Arden Bement, Jr., appointed by the president in August 2001, directs NIST, a bureau of the Department of Commerce. Bement was previously head of Purdue University's School of Nuclear Engineering. Prior to joining Purdue in 1993, he was vice-president of science and technology for TRW, Inc. and served as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and within the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

NIST will report its findings to Secretary of Commerce Donald L. Evans through his deputy, Phillip Bond. Evans is "almost like a brother" to Bush, according to Karen Hughes, Bush's White House counselor. Evans raised some $100 million for Bush's presidential campaign as his national finance chairman.

Although NIST was chosen by Bush to investigate the collapses, the agency reportedly launched its two-year study "partly in response to the complaints of victims' groups." Victims' families and fire engineers have been especially critical of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) report released April 30. The FEMA report was faulted for failing to include input from survivors of the attacks. NIST officials say they plan to interview survivors about the final moments before the tower collapses.

The 10-month delay in starting a forensic investigation was criticized by Glen Corbett, a professor in the fire-engineering department of New York's John Jay College. Corbett said that the proposed investigation "is the type of large-scale forensic inquiry that the federal government should have launched back in September."

During the public meeting, experts addressed inadequate fireproofing and other fire safety problems in high-rise buildings. "The fire service has seen a consistent weakening in fire safety," said Vincent Dunn, a retired New York City fire chief and fire safety consultant. He described climbing through buildings after fires and finding "nothing left up there but bent warped, twisted steel. There's no spray-on [fireproofing] left."

"After nine months, after knocking on the doors of elected officials...we are finally here today," said Sally Regenhard, founder of the Skyscraper Safety Campaign and mother of Christian Regenhard, one of the many firefighters who perished on 9-11. "Apparently the problem of inadequacy in fireproofing is not something new."

Victims' families said they hope to prevent others from suffering the same grief. "I can't tell you what it's like for a mother to see that building hit, knowing your child is in the building," Mary Fetchet told the Washington Post. "We're all at risk today....I do not want 3,000 people to lose their lives and have it be in vain." She lost her son Brad, 24, in the World Trade Center.

"The data obtained from people from videotape, and from phone calls is critical to the investigation. Please don't let this crucial information slip through our fingers," said Monica Gabrielle, on the founders of Skyscraper Safety Campaign. "We do not want a repeat of what happened to the WTC evidence." More than 90 percent of the physical evidence from the WTC site has reportedly been destroyed or recycled. I spoke with Matt Heyman, a NIST spokesman, who said the agency has only 70 pieces of steel to examine. Heyman added that the NIST investigation will be based on the FEMA report.

"Occupant accounts should be gathered on the fire and damage that was seen," said James Quintiere, from the Department of Fire Protection engineering at the University of Maryland. "That type of information is essential."

"Videos and photographs need to be reviewed. This is a very intensive effort that needs to be undertaken," said Quintiere, adding, "There is an allusion to a New York police helicopter that had videos, and I don't think anyone in this investigative effort has been privy to those yet."

VIDEO EVIDENCE CENSORED

Some of the essential video footage and photographs that have been kept from the American public and investigators are those made by European media outlets, which clearly point to explosions in the towers. Numerous survivors fleeing from the burning towers have described massive explosions on camera. Such firsthand reports are essential pieces of evidence that cannot be ignored.

There is footage from eyewitness interviews in which survivors describe explosions inside the buildings. Heyman said there had been "no" mention of any evidence of explosions during the meeting. When asked if NIST would investigate the alleged explosions, Heyman said the bureau would look at "anything that contributed to the collapse of the buildings."

"On the eighth floor we were blown back by a huge explosion," a black American in a dust-covered business suit told Denmark's DR-TV on 9-11. Another survivor wearing a red shirt told Germany's SAT1: "There was a big explosion creating a lot of panic, after that we calmed down, and got out of the towers." In another SAT1 interview, Tom Canaban tells the German journalist: "There was a big explosion but I managed to get out of the tower." Within seconds two FBI agents stepped in front of the TV camera, asked Canaban to stop the interview and escorted him away.

Several firefighters also reported explosions in the towers. One fireman on camera said he witnessed a "heavy duty explosion." Veteran firefighter Louie Cacchioli, 51, told People magazine: "I was taking firefighters up in the elevator to the 24th floor to get in position to evacuate workers. On the last trip up a bomb went off. We think there were bombs set in the building."

Oddly enough, this writer was criticized in November by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, a Zionist pressure group, for my article, "Eyewitness Reports Persist of Bombs at WTC Collapse" in which nothing was mentioned about Jews or Israel other than the fact that one of the WTC architects lives in Israel.

Careful analysis of the footage from the collapse of the first tower indicates explosive blasts occurring 5-10 stories below the collapsing section, as if timed detonations brought the tower down in a controlled demolition. These horizontal blasts, like those seen at the base of the towers, have not been explained.

An unexplained crater occurred in the center of WTC 6. WTC 7, which housed offices of the CIA, collapsed mysteriously in the late afternoon of Sept. 11. Fire engineers are baffled about what caused steel beans in WTC 7 to vaporize and the 47-story building to collapse.

An amateur video of the second plane hitting the south tower, shown on Danish TV2's "22 Fokus" on 19 September 2001, shows a laser beam-like spot moving across the west facade of the tower immediately before the plane crashes into it. The spot, which some experts believe is evidence of a laser guidance system, moves from left to right before the plane strikes the tower slightly lower and to the right of the dot.

Israeli Agents Confess to 9-11 Mission

June 28, 2002

The jubilant Israeli intelligence agents caught photographing the attacks on the World Trade Center were allowed to return to Israel where they divulged the purpose of their mission on a television program saying, "Our purpose was to document the event."

I first reported the explosive story of the 5 suspicious Israelis seen celebrating while filming the attacks on the World Trade Center shortly after September 11. ABC News recently reported on this story and added a comment that deserves attention.

The Forward, a respected Jewish newspaper in New York, reported that at least two of the men were Israeli intelligence (Mossad) agents. The Israeli agents were first seen filming the attack on the WTC while kneeling on the roof of a white van in the parking lot of a New Jersey apartment building across the river from lower Manhattan. "They seemed to be taking a movie," the resident who noticed them said. The men were taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background, she said. What struck her were the expressions on the men's faces. "They were like happy, you know … They didn't look shocked to me. I thought it was very strange," she said.

She found the behavior so suspicious that she wrote down the license plate number of the van and called the police. The FBI was soon on the scene and a statewide bulletin was issued on the van. The van belonged to a Mossad front company called Urban Moving Systems. Around 4 p.m. on Sept. 11, the van was pulled over, and five Israelis: Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari, all between 22 and 27 years old, were arrested at gunpoint. One had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock while another carried two foreign passports. Box cutters were found in the van.

"WE ARE NOT YOUR PROBLEM"

According to the police report, one of the men said they had been on the West Side Highway, which borders the World Trade Center on the west, "during the incident" — referring to the World Trade Center attack. Sivan Kurzberg, the driver, said, "We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem."

The case was turned over to the FBI's Foreign Counterintelligence Section because the FBI believed Urban Moving Systems was a "cover for an Israeli intelligence operation," ABC reported. While the FBI searched the company's Weehawken, N.J., offices, removing boxes of documents and a dozen computer hard drives, the owner of the company, Dominic Suter, was allowed to flee the country. When FBI agents tried to interview Suter a second time they discovered that he had cleared out of his New Jersey home and fled to Israel. When ABC reporters visited Urban Moving Systems, "it looked as if it had been shut down in a big hurry. Cell phones were lying around; office phones were still connected; and the property of dozens of clients remained in the warehouse."

The Israelis had been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, for overstaying their tourist visas and working in the United States illegally. Two weeks after their arrest, an immigration judge ordered them to be deported, however, FBI and CIA officials in Washington put a hold on the case, according to ABC. The five men were held in detention for more than two months. Some of them were placed in solitary confinement for 40 days and given as many as seven lie-detector tests. One of them, Paul Kurzberg, refused to take a lie-detector test for 10 weeks and then failed it, according to his lawyer.

"OUR PURPOSE WAS TO DOCUMENT THE EVENT."

A deal was struck between Israeli and U.S. government officials after 71 days and the five Israelis were put on a plane, and deported to Israel. The detained Israelis discussed their experience in America on an Israeli television talk show after their return home. One of the men said: "The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event."

The Zionists Who Gained from 9-11

June 19, 2002

Who benefitted when the World Trade Center towers collapsed? Who controlled access to the complex prior to 9-11? These burning questions continue to be ignored by the mainstream media.

Larry Silverstein, lease-holder of the World Trade Center, and Lewis Eisenberg, the man who negotiated the lease, are key supporters of Israel who have both held high positions in the largest Israeli fund-raising institution in the United States. Silverstein and his Australian-Israeli partner, Frank Lowy, are the real estate developers who obtained 99-year leases on the rental and retail spaces of the World Trade Center shortly before the catastrophe of 9-11. Although their leased property is destroyed, the leaseholders themselves stand to gain billions of dollars from insurance.

Eisenberg, the former chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, personally arranged the privatization of the World Trade Center property and oversaw the negotiations that delivered the leases into the private hands of Silverstein and Lowy. Eisenberg was recently appointed finance chairman of the Republican National Committee.

How did these well-known supporters of Israel come to control the property? What actually caused the buildings to collapse? There are two schools of thought.

There is the "official" theory that hijacked planes crashed into the towers and the subsequent fuel fires caused the twin towers to fall. The second theory, however, argues that other devices, such as explosive charges, were used to collapse the towers in a kind of controlled demolition for which the planes provided a useful distraction.

There remain significant amounts of eyewitness testimony and evidence to support the theory that explosives contributed to the collapse of the twin towers and WTC 7, which fell for no apparent reason late in the afternoon of 9-11. WTC 7 was a 47-story building built by Silverstein on property leased from the Port Authority.

There are video recordings and photographs which appear to show explosions occurring at the base of the towers prior to and during the collapses. In a remarkable three-dimensional image published in the German magazine GEO EPOCHE, which dedicated the December 2001 issue to 9-11, there are five or six large and deep craters be seen beneath the rubble. At least four huge craters are seen where the twin towers stood and one is squarely at the center of WTC 6. Another photograph shows what appears to be a sand-colored blast originating at the base of one of the towers and growing into an immense cloud of dust.

If explosive charges were used to collapse the towers, the question of who had access to the buildings prior to 9-11 emerges. Silverstein controlled access to the towers from the end of July when he obtained the 99-year lease. Who Silverstein is and how he obtained these leases for a fraction of their value are questions that have been completely avoided by the mainstream media.

Silverstein is the New York City commercial landlord who built WTC 7 in 1987. Silverstein won, with Lowy's Westfield America, a 99-year right-to-lease of the World Trade center from Eisenberg, the former chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on July 26, 2001. While Silverstein controlled the 10.6 million-square-foot office space in the WTC complex, Westfield leased the 427,000 square-foot retail mall.

Silverstein and Eisenberg have both held leadership positions with the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), a billion dollar Zionist "charity" organization. Silverstein is a former chairman of United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, Inc. This is an umbrella organization which raises hundreds of millions of dollars every year for its network of hundreds of member Zionist agencies in the United States and Israel.

Eisenberg, who was instrumental in obtaining the lease for Silverstein, sits on the Planning Board of UJA/United Jewish Federation. Eisenberg was the key person in negotiating the lease for Silverstein and Westfield, who were not the winners of the final bidding process on the 110-story towers. While the high bid came from Vornado Realty Trust, its path was blocked by demands to pay back taxes. In March 2001, Vornado pulled out after failing to reach a purchase agreement with Eisenberg, which opened the door for Silverstein and Lowy. Lowy obtained the retail lease in April while it took Silverstein until the end of July to obtain funding for the down payment.

One lender, GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corp., accused Silverstein of misallocating insurance money paid out after the 9-11 attack. In a complaint filed on Jan. 14 in the State Supreme court in Manhattan, the lender, GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corp., asserts that Silverstein used some insurance money to pay lobbyists in Albany and in Washington to try to limit his liability to the victims.

Eisenberg is a "New York moneyman" and a former Democrat who supports the liberal wing of the Republican Party. He has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to "pro-choice" Republican candidates. The newly appointed finance chairman for the Republican National Committee, Eisenberg has also served as a vice president of the strong arm of the Israeli lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

When New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman appointed Eisenberg Chairman of the Port Authority in February 1996, Forbes magazine said the formerly disgraced Goldman Sachs partner "got real lucky."

"What a strange political appointment," the magazine said, "considering the part he played in the sex scandal that rocked Goldman Sachs after his secretary accused him of sexually harassing her. "The truth ended up being that, yes, they had a brief affair, but, no, she was never harassed," Forbes wrote, adding, "all charges were dismissed, though Eisenberg did resign."

Silverstein is engaged in a lawsuit to double his insurance pay-off and may win as much as $7.1 billion from the insurance companies by arguing that the destruction of the towers was two insured events instead of one. The property was insured for $3.55 billion. Silverstein Properties Inc. had asked the judge to rule on the one-loss-or-two issue in a lawsuit against 22 of the 22 insurers on the property. District Judge John S. Martin Jr. rejected a notion for summary judgment in June. A trial is scheduled Sept. 3, although a request for a delay by the insurers is under consideration. While Silverstein Properties, a family-owned business, is "disappointed that the issue was not decided at this time, they are confident that they will prevail at trial," said Howard Rubenstein, a spokesman for Silverstein.

Mass Media Avoids Questions about 9-11

June 12, 2002

Two events in Washington involving relatives of last fall's terror attacks have demanded an independent non-partisan investigation into the events of 9-11.

Nine months after the worst terrorist attack in American history, grass-roots organizations convened in Washington asking questions and calling for an independent investigation. Although the two events were both well publicized and held in high profile venues, the mass media stayed away – avoiding the serious questions being asked about the attacks.

A network of independent 9-11 researchers "seeking answers and accountability" held a three-hour press conference at the National Press Club in Washington on June 10 to bring attention to the many unanswered questions surrounding the attacks. The group has recently launched a web site dedicated to raising public awareness of these issues: UnansweredQuestions.org. On June 12, the question that ranked highest among voters on the web site was: "Why did C-SPAN suddenly decide not to air your press conference scheduled to be held on June 10, 2002, in lieu of coverage of Homeland Security?"

The high-powered press conference presented two panels of experts, which included researchers, former government officials, relatives of the victims, and lawyers representing the families. Mary Schiavo, former inspector general of the Department of Transportation and author of Flying Blind, Flying Safe, spoke as a lawyer representing 32 passengers' families from the hijacked planes of Sept.11. The government is using a special fund "to silence the families of the victims," she said. Acceptance of the government compensation requires signing a no-fault agreement preventing the family from joining any future lawsuits.

The fund, which was established by Congress, is "unlimited" and although there are more than 3,000 victims from 9-11, only 10 families have received compensation, Schiavo told this reporter. The amount of compensation should be about $1.6 million per family although only one family received that amount, she said.

"We knew something was afoot," Schiavo said as she described numerous specific warnings of Middle Eastern terrorist threats against civilian aircraft received by the government and the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) in the months before September 2001. Schiavo recalled the simultaneous hijacking and blowing up of four planes in Jordan by a group known as Islamic Jihad on Sept. 12, 1970. Schiavo presented a statistical analysis of the number of hijackings since 1972 showing that there had been 682 planes hijacked during the past 30 years. She is preparing a lawsuit to bring against the FAA and the airlines for failing to provide the security required in the face of repeated and specific warnings of precisely such a hijacking event.

"There are a lot of people who should have known," said Lorna Brett of the Nolan Law Group, which is representing 9-11 families from the hijacked United Airlines planes. "It's about accountability." The lack of an independent non-partisan investigative commission means that it falls upon journalists to investigate the questions surrounding the attacks. "It's the most patriotic thing we can do to demand answers to these unanswered questions," Brett said.

One such investigative journalist, Michael Ruppert, spoke of the prior warnings from various foreign intelligence agencies to President Bush. Russian president Vladimir Putin warned Bush of such an attack weeks before Sept.11, according to Ruppert. Claims of ignorance of these warnings by officials of the Bush administration are "absolutely false," Ruppert said.

Tom Flocco, an investigative journalist who has written extensively about the unusual insider trading prior to 9-11, raised questions about the real-time monitoring of trading by the CIA and other intelligence agencies around the world. Flocco discussed the unusual trades placed by a company tied to Buzzy Krongaard, the executive director of the CIA. He said that Enron had 20 active CIA agents on its payroll before its demise. Flocco added that the anti-anthrax drug Cipro was made available at the White House on Sept.11, before any anthrax incident occurred.

A 20-year veteran of the foreign service, J. Michael Springmann, described the strange events that he noticed during his two years spent in the visa section of the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Fifteen of the 19 alleged terrorists obtained their U.S. visas at the consulate in Jeddah, according to Springmann. He recalled having repeatedly turned down visa requests from suspicious individuals only to see his denials inexplicably reversed by highly-placed officials from the CIA claiming "national security" reasons.

The link between weaknesses in the immigration system and terrorism was discussed by Dr. Steve Camarota of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies. Camarota pointed to "sloppy administration," lax standards, and lack of enforcement as contributing factors which make "life a lot easier for terrorists." Of 48 suspected al Qaeda terrorists arrested inside the United states, 22 had violated immigration laws prior to 9-11, Camarota said.

VICTIMS RALLY

On June 11, 300 relatives of victims of Sept.11 rallied in front of the Capitol in Washington to demand an independent non-partisan investigation. The rally was organized by three organizations of victims' relatives and The Skyscraper Safety Campaign. Several members of Congress including House Minority leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) addressed the rally, the first of its kind in Washington, in support of the families' demand for an independent commission. The organizations say that only an independent commission can conduct a proper and comprehensive investigation free from political pressure." The relatives want an independent commission to examine the role of Congress and to complement any congressional investigations.

I asked Gephardt why it had taken nine months to call for an independent and non-partisan investigation of the terrorist attack and if he agreed that the wholesale of destruction of the evidence from the World Trade Center would hinder any future investigation. Gephardt said he was optimistic that Congress would commission an investigation before next Sept.11.

MEDIA IGNORES QUESTIONS

Many Americans remain unaware of the questions surrounding the attacks and the reluctance of Congress and the administration to commission an independent investigation. The mass media has done little to bring these issues to the attention of the public. Despite the fact that the two 9-11 events were unprecedented and of great national and historical importance, the cable network C-SPAN failed to cover either of them.

I spoke with Terry Murphy, vice president for programming at C-SPAN and head of the editorial board. Murphy said he was responsible for the decision not to cover the 9-11 press conference or rally. While C-SPAN had considered covering the events and can field more than 10 crews in Washington, Murphy said the network 'can't do it all with its limited resources." His decision not to cover the events was "totally independent" of any political pressure and he did not regret it, he said.

I asked Robin Scullin, C-SPAN's media relations spokesperson, if the network considered the concerns of the families of the "seminal event" behind the war of terrorism to be less newsworthy than the events the network had covered on June 10 and 11. Scullin said that considering the attacks of Sept.11 as the "seminal event" was an opinion and abruptly terminated the call.

Fire Engineers Refute 9-11 Collapse Theory

May 27, 2002

Published in American Free Press; written in January 2002.

A respected professional magazine read by fire fighters and engineers is calling the investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Towers a farce and a sham. Fire Engineering magazine, the 125-year old journal of record among America's fire engineers and firefighters, blasted the investigation being conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) of the collapsed World Trade Center as a "a half-baked farce.

Fire Engineering frequently publishes technical studies of major fires and is read in fire departments and schools of fire engineering across the nation. Fire Engineering's editor, William Manning, issued a "call to action" to America's firefighters and fire engineers in the January 2002 issue asking them to contact their representatives in Congress and officials in Washington to demand a blue ribbon panel to thoroughly investigate the collapse of the World Trade Center structures. Manning challenged the theory that the towers collapsed as a result of the crashed airliners and the subsequent fuel fires, saying, "Respected members of the fire protection engineering community are beginning to raise red flags, and a resonating theory has emerged: The structural damage from the planes and the explosive ignition of jet fuel in themselves were not enough to bring down the towers."

No evidence has been produced to support the theory that the burning jet fuel and secondary fires "attacking the questionably fireproofed lightweight trusses and load-bearing columns directly caused the collapses," Manning wrote, adding that the collapses occurred "in an alarmingly short time." Manning visited the site shortly after the collapse and his photographs appeared in the October 2001 issue of Fire Engineering. None of the photos show the load-bearing central steel support columns standing or fallen, which raises the question, what caused these columns to disintegrate?

The steel from the site must be preserved to allow investigators to determine what caused the collapse, Manning said. "The destruction and removal of evidence must stop immediately. For more than three months, structural steel from the World Trade Center has been and continues to be cut up and sold for scrap. Crucial evidence that could answer many questions about high-rise building design practices and performance under fire conditions is on the slow boat to China," Manning said, "perhaps never to be seen again in America until you buy your next car."

"Such destruction of evidence," Manning wrote, "shows the astounding ignorance of government officials to the value of a thorough, scientific investigation of the largest fire-induced collapse in world history." Nowhere in the national standard for fire investigation does one find an exemption allowing the destruction of evidence for buildings over 10 stories tall, Manning said. "Clearly, there are burning questions that need answers. Based on the incident's magnitude alone, a full-throttle, fully-resourced, forensic investigation is imperative. The lessons about the buildings' design and behavior in this extraordinary event must be learned and applied in the real world.

"Did they throw away the locked doors from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire? Did they throw away the gas can used at the Happyland Social Club fire? Did they cast aside the pressure-regulating valves at the Meridian Plaza fire? Of course not. But essentially, that's what they're doing at the World trade Center."

In a separate editorial, "WTC Investigation? A Call to Action," by the magazine's technical editor, Prof. Glenn Corbett of John Jay University in New York City, and two other expert fire engineers who specialize in high-rise buildings, The FEMA-led investigation was called "uncoordinated" and "superficial."

"The World Trade Center disaster demands the most comprehensive, detailed investigation possible," the writers said. "No event in our entire fire service history has ever come close to the magnitude of this incident." Given the magnitude of the disaster "you would think we would have the largest fire investigation in the world history," the editorial says. "You would be wrong. Instead, we have a series of unconnected and uncoordinated superficial inquiries. No comprehensive 'Presidential Blue Ribbon Commission.' No top-notch National Transportation Safety Board-like response. Ironically, we will probably gain more detailed information about the destruction of the planes than we will about the destruction of the towers. We are literally treating the steel removed from the site like garbage, not like crucial fire scene evidence."

A group of engineers from the American Society of Civil Engineers, commissioned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is reported to be studying "some aspects of the collapse," but not all, according to Manning and others. The engineers' investigation, they say, has not looked into all aspects of the disaster and has had limited access to documents and other evidence. "Except for the marginal benefit obtained from a three-day, visual walk-through of evidence sites conducted by ASCE investigation committee members - described by one close source as a "tourist trip" - no one's checking the evidence for anything," Manning said. "As things now stand and if they continue in such fashion, the investigation into the World Trade Center fire and collapse will amount to paper and computer generated hypotheticals."

Engineers have also complained that they have been shackled with bureaucratic restrictions that prevented them form examining the disaster site, interviewing witnesses and requesting crucial information like recorded distress calls to police and fire departments. "This is almost the dream team of engineers in the country working on this, and our hands are tied," one engineer who asked not to be identified told the New York Times. Members of the team of engineers have been threatened with dismissal for speaking to the press. "FEMA is controlling everything," the anonymous engineer complained.

"Comprehensive disaster investigations mean increased safety," Manning said. "They mean positive change. NASA knows it. The NTSB knows it. Does FEMA know it? No. Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the 'official investigation' blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society of Civil Engineers is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure," he wrote.

Israel's Vast Spy Network of Fake Art Students

March 20, 2002

Attorney General John Ashcroft's office said the explosive story of an Israeli spy network of bogus art students operating across the United States is an "urban myth," but other law enforcement officials say otherwise.

The important details of a massive Israeli spy ring that operated across the United States—employing Israeli intelligence agents posing as "art students" to gain access to sensitive U.S. government offices, defense companies, and the private homes of employees of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)—are starting to emerge. What has now become clear is that the agents and modus operandi of the ring were known by the highest levels of government and that policies were changed to counter the threat of Israeli surveillance through computer networks.

The explosive story of the Israeli spy ring, discovered operating in the United States last year, and the 61-page DEA task-force report that contained the details about this spy ring was first revealed in detail on March 4 by Intelligence Online (IO), a well-respected Internet news service based in Paris, France. IO's story elaborated in some respects on earlier findings by Carl Cameron of Fox News who referenced the "Israeli art students" as part of his much larger story. Like the Cameron report, the IO story was picked up by the leading French daily, Le Monde, and, in some respects, by the Associated Press, but was quickly dropped.

Referring to the reports, the March 15 issue of Forward, one of the oldest and most respected Jewish newspapers in America, commented that: "Despite angry denials by Israel and its American supporters, reports that Israel was conducting spying activities in the United States may have a grain of truth, the Forward has learned." Forward commented smugly that: "Both the French and the Fox reports were dismissed by Israel and its supporters and received limited coverage in the American media."

LeMonde and Fox (as well as IO) suggested the likelihood that these Israeli operatives were spying on Arab terrorist cells operating in the United States and almost certainly had advance knowledge about the impending 9-11 attacks—a theory that inflamed Israel and its American supporters. The Associated Press was careful not to mention this aspect of the story.

A British intelligence and military analysis publication, Jane's Information Group, noted the peculiar absence of reporting in the American media on the "explosive story" of the huge network of Israeli spies that made headlines around the world:

It is rather strange that the U.S. media . . . seem to be ignoring what may well prove to be the most explosive story since the Sept. 11 attack, the alleged breakup of a major Israeli espionage operation in the United States which aimed to infiltrate both the Justice and Defense departments and which may also have been tracking al Qaeda terrorists before the aircraft hijackings took place.

Reports of Israeli "art students" calling on DEA employees across the country began as early as January 2000 and continued through June 2001. What is not clear is what the ring of more than 120 agents was up to and why some Israelis linked to the attacks in New York and Washington were allowed to flee or were sent back to Israel after Sept. 11 on visa violations rather than being charged and prosecuted.

The "art students" are reported to be active agents in electronic surveillance units of the Israeli military. The Israelis covered the country in "organized" teams of eight to 10 people, with each group having a team leader. The DEA document lists the Israelis' military and intelligence specialties as "special forces," "intelligence officer," "demolition/explosive ordnance specialist," "bodyguard to head of Israeli army," "electronic intercept operator," and "son of a two-star (Israeli) army general."

American intelligence services have become worried by the dominance of Israeli companies in sensitive areas of telecommunications. One Israeli company, Comverse Infosys (now called Verint) has provided law enforcement agencies with computer equipment for wiretapping. It is thought that the equipment came with "catch gates" that allowed the Israelis to listen in. Software made by Amdocs, another Israeli outfit records virtually every call placed through the 25 largest U.S. telephone companies. The relationship of these companies to the detained Israelis is detailed in the 60-page document.

The DEA document reveals that many of the Israeli operatives had addresses in San Diego, Little Rock, Irving (Tex.) and South Florida very close to the homes of Arabs suspected of involvement in the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The alleged hijacker, Mohammad Atta, lived at 3389 Sheridan St. in Hollywood, Fla., while a few blocks away, at 4220 Sheridan, a group of the Israelis spies resided. Especially in Florida, where 10 of the 19 alleged Sept. 11 terrorists lived, the revelations about the Israeli activities bolster speculation that the Israelis had advance knowledge but did not pass intelligence on to the U.S.

A Justice Department official briefed on an ongoing multi-agency task force investigating the Israeli spy ring was quoted by newsweekly Insight as having said: "We think there is something quite sinister here but are unable at this time to put our finger on it." Another law-enforcement official said: "The higher-ups don't want to deal with this and neither does the FBI because it involves Israel."

The DEA report found that several military bases also had experienced unauthorized entries by the Israelis including two bases from which Stealth aircraft and other supersecret military units operate. Unauthorized photographing of military sites and civilian industrial complexes, such as petroleum-storage facilities, also was reported, the document confirms.

In great detail, the DEA document contains "scores of encounters" between federal agents and Israeli agents posing as art students. The seemingly innocuous cover was used to gain access to sensitive U.S. offices and military installations, such as MacDill Air Force Base in March 2001, and Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City one month later, where "a special alert" was issued because of the aggressive Israeli agents. Tinker houses AWACS surveillance planes and repairs B-1 bombers. The Oklahoman, prompted by the French revelations, recently reported that 10 months ago four of the Israeli agents carrying military IDs were detained at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma.

In virtually every incident reported by the DEA field-offices the Israelis used the same methods: Israelis would attempt to enter secure buildings, take photographs, follow federal agents when they left buildings, show up at their homes and circle their neighborhoods, visiting their houses and then departing. At a DEA agent's house in Chicago, the police were called because the Israelis were so aggressive.

SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITIES

One report, titled "Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities," lists more than 180 documented-incident cases. "The nature of the individuals' conduct, combined with intelligence information and historical information regarding past incidents involving Israeli organized crime, leads IS [DEA's Internal Security division] to believe the incidents may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity," said one classified document quoted by Insight. "This is very odd behavior under any situation," says a DEA official who had heard but not yet seen the reports until Insight shared them. "The patterns are clear and they pose a significant danger to our officers in the field."

When I spoke with Guillaume Dasquie, of IO, he told me he had solid evidence of the authenticity of the DEA document, and would reveal new evidence to counter claims made by the Department of Justice that there had been "no case of Israeli espionage" in the United States and that the matter was "an urban myth."

The Israeli spy ring was "examined at the highest levels of the Bush administration," Dasquie said. On March 13, IO was informed by an official at the Department of Justice that the report had been handed over to the department's Joint Terrorism Task Force. The same day, at a DEA press conference, the agency's administrator, Asa Hutchinson, said that he had passed the document along to "other agencies" working on the matter. On March 14, IO said it has a copy of a memorandum dated March 4 and signed by Robert Diegelman, assistant attorney general for administration. The memo was addressed to officials in charge of the Justice Department's information systems. It called on them to forbid information system access to all non-U.S. citizens and no longer use foreign-supplied computer and communication gear. The memo referred to a warning entitled Department of Justice Order 2640.2D Information Technology Security, dated 12 July 2001, which cautioned against using information technology sold by foreign firms. The warning of July 12 confirmed that the DEA's report was a security concern at the highest level.

The DEA task force issued an initial report in June of last year that listed the names of 125 Israeli nationals and described their activities in the United States. The document suggests that the ring had infiltrated federal buildings, according to IO, and that Israeli computer companies sell equipment to U.S. government departments. The DEA purchased $25 million worth of interception equipment from a number of Israeli companies named in the report in September 1997.

An AP report from Washington on March 9 confirmed that the DEA document had been the joint work of a task force. The AP report confirmed that several of the Israelis had never enrolled in the art colleges they claimed to attend in Israel. In addition, IO reported: "We've also obtained an internal document from the US Coast Guard, an Intelligence Bulletin dated Jan. 17, 2002. Reserved for security bosses in America's biggest companies, the bulletin regularly tracks all attempts to penetrate protected sites recorded by the US Coast Guard."

The Jan. 17 bulletin described the case of a man and woman "of Middle East origin" taking pictures of a refinery. When questioned they said they were "art students" even though they were able to discuss technical details concerning refineries. Other cases of suspicious activity were also reported.

A spokesman for Attorney General John Ashcroft initially attempted to dismiss the story as an "urban myth." However, the New York-based Forward effectively exposed Ashcroft's prevarication on March 15:

In March 2001, the federal National Counter intelligence Executive issued a warning urging employees to report all contact with people describing themselves as Israeli art students. It said some had gone to private residences of senior U.S. officials under the guise of selling art.

"These individuals have been described as aggressive," the warning said. However, the warning added that there may be two groups involved, one with an "apparently legitimate money-making goal while the second, perhaps a non-Israeli group, may have ties to a Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalist group." The idea that two such groups were operating at the same time (and that one may have been a "non-Israeli group" presumably posing as Israelis) should raise questions. Some might suggest that a group of Israelis operating in the United States were actually posing as Arabs.

Forward defended Israel saying that "far from pointing to Israeli spying against U.S. government and military facilities . . . the incidents in question appear to represent a case of Israelis in the United States spying on a common enemy, radical Islamic networks suspected of links to Middle East terrorism." Attempting to put a positive spin on the revelations, Forward contends that tensions between the United States and Israel arise not from the fact that the United States believed the Israelis were spying on Americans, but because the Israelis had failed to advise the United States that they were engaged in spying against Arabs on American soil.

Deceptive PR Firm Joins War Effort

February 20, 2002

In Washington D.C., the name of the game is public relations and the Bush Administration has contracted some old pros to foist the ever widening war on terrorism onto the world. The Pentagon has hired the Rendon Group (TRG), a powerful Washington public-relations firm run by John W. Rendon Jr., to "advise" the Pentagon's newly-formed disinformation agency, the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI).

TRG reportedly had a four-month contract worth $397,000 to help the Pentagon look good while bombing Afghanistan. TRG will supplement the efforts of the Army's 4th Psychological Operations Group, which is based at Fort Bragg and is now conducting operations in Afghanistan and the surrounding region. Rendon coordinated George McGovern's presidential campaign in Maine in the early 1970s and later worked for Michael Dukakis when he ran for governor of Massachusetts. After working on Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign in 1980, Rendon went to work for the Democratic National Committee, and eventually became its executive director.

TRG's biggest operations are reported to have been in support of the Pentagon and the CIA. In describing his work in a speech to the Air Force Academy in 1996, Rendon said, "I am a person who uses communications to meet public policy or corporate objectives. I am an information warrior and a perception manager. The group has been hired on several occasions to support U.S. military actions. During the past decade the firm has worked to shape public opinion during the conflicts in Panama, Haiti, Kuwait, and Iraq.

TRG's first national security assignment came in 1989, during Operation Just Cause, the U.S. invasion of Panama. After Manuel Noriega was overthrown, TRG offered "crisis management and operational support" to the new U.S.-backed government and "courted the international press and overseas radio stations to make the cause real to other governments and to give hope to Panamanians."

FABRICATED ATROCITIES

TRG's next assignment came the following year, when it supported the Kuwaiti government in exile after the Iraqi invasion. Rendon and his staffers set up a TV production house in London that specialized in fabricating atrocities carried out by Saddam Hussein's troops. The group has done extensive work for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Kuwaiti royal family, and the Iraqi National Congress - the opposition group seeking to oust Saddam.

Founded in 1981, TRG has offices in Boston and Washington and a staff of about two dozen people, including a number of former White House operatives and congressional staffers. TRG worked with Hill & Knowlton, who masterminded the pro-Kuwaiti propaganda campaign. And while Kuwait's activities directed at manipulating American public opinion should have been exposed as foreign propaganda under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the Justice department chose not to enforce it.

In one of the most glaring examples of disinformation foisted on the American public, in November 1990, a 15-year old Kuwaiti girl testified before the Congress that she had seen Iraqi soldiers tossing premature babies onto the floor of a Kuwaiti hospital so their incubators could be sent to Iraq. Senators cited her testimony as a crucial factor in their decision to go to war with Iraq. It later turned out that the girl was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and that her "testimony" had been arranged and scripted by Hill & Knowlton.

As a public-relations firm, Rendon has clients in 79 countries, including official trade agencies of the United States, Bulgaria, Russia, and Uzbekistan. One of Rendon's clients has been the al Sabah family, the royal family of Kuwait. TRG helped al Sabah create a sympathetic image in the United States during the Gulf War.

Rendon has worked with the CIA to build the Iraqi National Congress, the U.S.-backed group that is seeking to oust Saddam Hussein. In 1991, TRG "provided it with its name and more than $12 million in covert funding between 1992 and 1996," according to ABC News. TRG spent nearly $24 million in 1991 and 1992 to produce a media blitz against Saddam with comic books, videos, a traveling "atrocity exhibition" photo exhibit, and two "gray" clandestine radio stations. The stations Rendon designed and supervised were Radio Hurriah (Radio Freedom) and the Iraqi Broadcasting Corporation (IBC). TRG also worked to build international support for continued economic sanctions against Iraq, even as reports of civilian suffering and mass starvation were beginning to attract widespread attention.

U.S. Lies to Sell War on Terror

February 20, 2002

The Pentagon has opened a new propaganda office that plans to blend fact with fiction and plant "disinformation" in media outlets in order to sell the "War on Terror" to foreign audiences. As part of a global effort to influence public opinion and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries, the Pentagon is developing plans for a new information agency, the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), to plant false news items in foreign media organizations.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reportedly loves to cite the celebrated dictum of the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: "In wartime truth is so precious she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Claiming that foreign critics of the U.S.-led war on terrorism have been misinformed, Rumsfeld said that "we need to do a better job to make sure that people are not confused as to what this is about."

The Pentagon's OSI office, which was established shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was a response by the Bush administration to the widely acknowledged fact that the United states was losing public support overseas for its war on terrorism, particularly in Islamic countries. Headed by Brigadier General Simon P. Worden of the Air Force, the OSI is circulating classified proposals calling for aggressive propaganda campaigns that use not only the foreign media and the Internet, but also covert operations. The OSI will reportedly employ disinformation techniques, used widely during World War II by Britain and the United States to spread false information within otherwise accurate news releases.

Worden envisions a broad mission ranging from "black" campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to "white" public affairs that rely on truthful news releases, Pentagon officials said. One proposal reportedly involves sending journalists, civic leaders and foreign leaders e-mail messages that promote the administration's views or attack unfriendly governments. The messages would be distributed through outside Internet sources to conceal their origin. A senior Pentagon official told the New York Times: "the return address will probably be a dot-com, not a dot-mil," a reference to the military's Internet designation.

TARGET EUROPE

The OSI's main target for propaganda will be Islamic countries in the Middle East and Asia, the campaign may also be directed at Western Europe, where the Bush administration's strategy to fight terrorism has been widely criticized. Although the military regularly engages in propaganda warfare against hostile nations during war, the OSI will expand the military's propaganda mission into allied nations in the Middle East, Asia and even Western Europe. Although the Pentagon and the CIA are barred by law from propaganda activities in the United States, disinformation planted in foreign media organizations, could end up being published or broadcast by American news organizations.

The new office "rolls up all the instruments within the Department of Defense (DOD) to influence foreign audiences," its assistant for operations, Thomas A. Times, a former Army colonel and psychological operations officer, said at a conference. "DOD has not traditionally done these things."

There are misgivings within the Pentagon of venturing into an area traditionally the domain of the CIA and the State Department. The main fear is that by feeding slanted and possibly false information to foreign government officials and the international media, the OSI might undermine the credibility of the Pentagon's official press department. Several senior officials at the Pentagon have questioned whether the OSI's mission is too broad and possibly even illegal, according to the New York Times article. One Defense Department official said: "We shouldn't be in that business. Leave the propaganda leads to the CIA, the spooks. If we get the reputation for spreading false information, then what is anyone to believe and not believe that comes out of this building?" Other officials fear the initiative, once revealed might weaken support for the U.S. among its allies.

One of the military units assigned to carry out the policies of the OSI is the Army's Psychological Operations Command. The command was involved in dropping millions of flyers and broadcasting scores of radio programs into Afghanistan encouraging Taliban and al Qaeda soldiers to surrender.

German Intelligence Expert Refutes U.S. Version of 9-11

January 9, 2002

A former German intelligence chief refutes the official version of what happened on Sept. 11, questioning why Congress hasn't called for a special inquiry to investigate what really occurred on that terrible day.

The German newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel, recently interviewed Andreas von Bülow, the former head of the parliamentary commission that oversees the German secret services, about the terror attacks of Sept. 11. Von Bülow, who I interviewed in early December, said the provocative Tagesspiegel interview published on Jan. 13, was the first time the German press had asked him about the problems surrounding the attacks.

"The planning of the attacks was technically and organizationally a master achievement—to hijack four huge airplanes within a few minutes and within one hour, to drive them into their targets, with complicated flight maneuvers," said von Bülow. "This is unthinkable, without years of support from state intelligence services."

This led the interviewer to call von Bülow "a conspiracy theorist."

"Yeah, yeah, that's the ridicule from those who prefer to follow the official, politically correct line," von Bülow responded. "Even investigative journalists are fed propaganda and disinformation. Anyone who doubts the official line is called crazy."

Despite the controversial content of von Bülow's recent comments, "there has been no response in the German press," von Bülow told me. "The media has to ask the questions," he said, "Ashcroft and Bush—they are the officials who have to answer the questions." Since Sept. 11, "public opinion is being forced into a direction that I consider wrong," von Bülow said. "I wonder why so many questions have not been asked. Normally, with such a terrible event, various leads and trails appear and are discussed by the investigators, the media and the government: 'Is there something here or not? Are the explanations plausible?' In this case, that is not happening at all."

Before a government goes to war, it must first establish who the enemy is, von Bülow said. "It has a duty to provide evidence. According to its own admission, it has not been able to present any evidence that would hold up in court." Concerning the video evidence, von Bülow said: "When one is dealing with intelligence services, one can imagine manipulations of the highest quality. Hollywood could provide these techniques. I consider the videos inappropriate as evidence."

Von Bülow, who controlled the budgets of German intelligence from 1969 to 1994, cannot understand why Congress has not opened a formal investigation into the attacks and the failure of American intelligence agencies to prevent them. "There are 26 intelligence services in the U.S.A. with a budget of $30 billion, which were not able to prevent the attacks," von Bülow said. "Officially, there is nothing." he said. "They say that they didn't have any idea that this would happen." While four planes had been hijacked "for more than 60 decisive minutes, the military and intelligence agencies kept the fighter planes on the ground," von Bülow said. "However, 48 hours later, the FBI presented a list of suicide attackers. Within 10 days, it emerged that seven of them were still alive.

"Why has the director of the FBI not taken a position regarding these contradictions? Where did the list come from, why it was false? If I were the chief investigator in such a case, I would go before the public on a regular basis, and provide information on which leads are valid and which are not," he said, "and what about the obscure stock transactions? In the week prior to the attacks, the amount of transactions in stocks in American Airlines, United Airlines, and insurance companies, increased 1,200 percent. It was for a value of $15 billion. Some people must have known something. Who?"

ISRAEL KNEW?

Although von Bülow told me in December 2001 that he believes that the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, is behind the Sept. 11 attacks, he said such political discussion is beyond the pale in German journalism. When asked by Tagesspiegel who might have known about the attacks, von Bülow's comments about apparent Israeli culpability and the agenda of Israel's Ariel Sharon were deleted. Israel is protected in the German media, in which any criticism of the Jewish state is stifled. This is because of "the special relationship" between the two states. However, the Israeli agenda has advanced as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Don't believe the Arabs—they are foes," is the message behind the "brainwashing" being done by the U.S. government and the unquestioning mass media, said von Bülow. "With the help of the horrifying attacks, the Western mass democracies are being subjected to brainwashing. The enemy image of anti-communism doesn't work anymore; it is to be replaced by peoples of Islamic belief. They are accused of having given birth to suicidal terrorism."

The image of the new enemy comes from Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington, two policy-makers of American intelligence and foreign policy, von Bülow said. "Already in the middle of the 1990s, Huntington believed, people in Europe and the U.S. needed someone they could hate—this would strengthen their identification with their own society. And Brzezinski, the mad dog, as adviser to President Jimmy Carter, campaigned for the exclusive right of the U.S. to seize all the raw materials of the world, especially oil and gas. "In his analysis of political processes," von Bülow said, "a global map of civil wars and conflicts coincides with the locations of these strategic minerals. The same is the case with the third map: nodal points of the drug trade," he said.

The huge raw material reserves of the former Soviet Union, as well as the pipeline routes, are now at the disposal of the United States and Britain. The fact that the events of Sept. 11 "fit perfectly in the concept of the armaments industry, the intelligence agencies, the whole military-industrial-academic complex," von Bülow says, is "conspicuous."

"What has gone on, and goes on, in the name of intelligence services, are true crimes," von Bülow said. He is the author of Im Namen des Staates, a book which documents some of the criminal activities of the CIA and the German intelligence services.

Von Bülow, told me that "95 percent of the work of intelligence agencies around the world is deception and disinformation," and pointed to the false leads that were apparently planted to incriminate Arab terrorists in the attacks. These leads, he said, were like tracks left behind by "a herd of stampeding elephants." The abundance of such obvious clues, such as Mohammed Atta's passport, which mysteriously survived the crash and explosion that allegedly destroyed the shock- and fire-proof cockpit recorders, were like the German children's' game Schnitzeljagd, or Schnitzel Hunt, in which small bits of paper are left behind as clues for the children, von Bülow said. Atta's passport, which he had reported as having been stolen long before Sept. 11, amazingly reappeared unburned and intact on top of a pile of rubble near the World Trade Center, according to Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Atta, the suspected leader, allegedly left Portland for Boston on the morning of Sept. 11, in order to board the plane that later hit the World Trade Center. "If this Atta was the decisive man in the operation, it's really strange that he took such a risk of taking a plane that would reach Boston such a short time before the connecting flight. Had his flight been a few minutes late, he would not have been on the plane that was hijacked. Why should a sophisticated terrorist do this?" von Bülow said.

"They made payments with credit cards with their own names; they reported to their flight instructors with their own names. They left behind a rented car with flight manuals in Arabic for jumbo jets. They took with them, on their suicide trip, wills and farewell letters, which fell into the hands of the FBI, because they were stored in the wrong place and wrongly addressed." Clues were left behind, like in Schnitzeljagd, which "were meant to be followed," he said.

Von Bülow compared Sept. 11 with first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. "In the middle was the bomb maker, a former Egyptian officer," von Bülow said. "He had pulled together some Muslims for the attack. They were sneaked into the country by the CIA, despite a State Department ban on their entry. At the same time, the leader of the band was an FBI informant. And he made a deal with the authorities: At the last minute, the dangerous explosive material would be replaced by a harmless powder. The FBI did not stick to the deal. The bomb exploded, so to speak, with the knowledge of the FBI. The official story of the crime was quickly found—the criminals were evil Muslims," von Bülow said.

When asked what he would do, von Bülow said: "My task is concluded by saying it could not have happened that way. Search for the truth."

The Manipulated Bin Laden Tape

January 7, 2002

German experts say the "smoking gun" videotape of Osama Bin Laden has been rigged and is of no value as evidence of guilt. Independent Arabic translators say that the most important parts of the Pentagon's translation of the "smoking gun" video of Osama Bin Laden were translated incorrectly and that incriminating words have been put into his mouth.

Two independent translators and an expert on Arabic studies carefully analyzed the Pentagon's translation of the video, which President Bush called "a devastating declaration of guilt." The experts worked from the original Arabic soundtrack and found that the government's translation of the Arabic was not only inaccurate but even "manipulated." The Arabic language experts were interviewed on the German state television show, Monitor, which broadcast the analysis of the "smoking gun" video on Dec. 20, 2001. One of the Translators, Dr. Abdel El M. Husseini, said, "I have carefully examined the Pentagon's translation. This translation is very problematic, at the most important places which have been presented as proof of Bin Laden's guilt, the Pentagon translation does not agree with the Arabic heard on the video."

The Pentagon translation has Bin Laden saying, "We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy..." Alami said, "The words 'in advance are not even heard on the tape. This translation is wrong. When we take the original Arabic from the tape there are no misunderstandings which allow us to read this into the original."

At another point, the government translation has Bin Laden saying: "We had notification since the previous Thursday that the event would take place on that day is not heard in the original Arabic." The Pentagon's translation also mistranslated the sentence "We ordered each of them to go to America" in the active voice while the original Arabic is in the passive voice: they were ordered to go." The translation using "we" is wrong, Alami says.

Alami said that the following sentence that has been translated by the Pentagon, "they didn't know anything about the operation," is not understandable on the tape.

Prof. Gernot Rotter, professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the University of Hamburg said, "The American translators who listened and transcribed the tapes have apparently written a lot of things into the text that they wanted to hear, which are actually not heard on the tape no matter how many times you listen to it. "Regardless of whether Bin Laden or his organization was involved in the attacks or not, this tape is of such bad quality, is some places it cannot be understood at all, and those parts which can be understood are torn out of context so that the tape cannot be used as evidence to prove anything," Rotter said. Although the independent expert analysis has been widely reported in Germany, it has not been reported in the American mainstream media.

The Spoils of War: The Minerals of Afghanistan

January 7, 2002

Published in American Free Press of January 7, 2002(Written in October 2001)

As a nation, Afghanistan is poor. But there's a world of treasure beneath the surface of the landscape. Afghanistan has an extraordinary abundance of rare and strategic minerals—now all within easy reach of the global planners who installed a puppet government that they control and protect.

Pipelines transporting the immense gas and oil reserves of Central Asia and the Caspian basin to global markets will undoubtedly play an important role in Afghanistan's future, but the country's abundance of strategic minerals has the potential to greatly enrich the Afghans—if the wealth of the nation is not plundered.

Afghanistan has rich and extensive mineral resources including gold, silver, uranium, beryllium, copper, chrome, lead, zinc, manganese, iron and nickel. Lapis lazuli, amethyst, beryl, ruby, emerald, sapphire, alabaster, tourmaline, jade, and quartz are just some of the precious and semiprecious gemstones that have been mined in the country for centuries.

California-based geologist Bonita Chamberlin, who spent 25 years exploring the country, is convinced that Afghanistan's vast mineral deposits including oil and natural gas and gemstones could bring the nation great wealth. With Gary Bowersox, Chamberlin co-authored Gemstones of Afghanistan (1995) regarded as the most complete study of Afghanistan's gems and minerals.

Chamberlin told me that she had identified 91 minerals, metals, and gems at 1,407 documented potential mining sites in Afghanistan. These sites also contain solid combustible minerals, metallic and non-metallic minerals, rare metals, radioactive elements, precious metals and gemstones, salt and industrial minerals. Beryllium and uranium are among the minerals in Afghanistan of the greatest strategic value, Chamberlin said.

Chamberlin began surveying Afghanistan in the mid-1970s while working with companies cultivating cotton and grapes. The scope of her work changed during the Soviet invasion when heavy bombing uncovered significant deposits of rubies, sapphires, emeralds and other gemstones. Afghanistan has plentiful mineral wealth due to the collision of the Indian subcontinent with the Asian continent, which trapped and combined chemicals from ancient seas with those from the land under tremendous geologic pressures. This collision "formed minerals that exist in very few places in the world," Chamberlin said. Afghans are only lacking the infrastructure to exploit their nation's mineral wealth, she said. "The people just need the expertise and the direction." When the required infrastructure is developed, Afghans "could rule the world," Chamberlin told the Culver City Rock and Mineral Club in California.

BERYLLIUM

Beryllium is a strategic and essential material used in the aerospace, energy, defense, nuclear, automotive, medical, and electronics industries. A unique metal with properties unmatched by any other metal, beryllium is both extremely light and strong. It is one-third lighter than aluminum but six times stiffer than steel. It also has one of the highest melting points of the light metals.

Beryllium is used in the nuclear industry in fusion reactors and in the construction of nuclear devices for military applications. Beryllium alloys are essential structural materials for the production of high-speed aircraft, including the space shuttle and the new Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), missiles, surveillance and communication satellites. It is also used in Apache helicopters, tanks, and aircraft landing gear components.

Military electronic targeting and infrared countermeasure systems use high beryllium content components, as do advanced missile and radar navigation systems. Beryllium alloys are used in battery contacts and electronic connectors in cell phones. Beryllium-copper provides the high reliability and miniaturization needed in these applications. FM radio, high-definition and cable television and underwater fiber optic cable systems all depend on beryllium. Computer and laser technologies require beryllium. It is used in computers where lightness and stiffness are required. As computers get smaller, lighter, and faster, the beryllium-copper alloy is often the only material that meets the demands.

RUBIES & SAPPHIRES

Afghanistan possesses rich gem deposits, many of which are used in lasers and advanced weapons technologies. Rubies have been used in lasers since laser technology was first developed. Historical accounts indicate that the ruby mines of Badakhshan in Afghanistan were the source of many of the finest and largest rubies in gem collections around the world, such as those in the crown jewels of Iran, the collection in Istanbul's Topkapi, Russia's Kremlin, and England's Tower of London.

Sapphire is used in Lockheed Martin's latest laser targeting system, "Sniper," which is used on U.S. fighters. The Sniper has a sapphire window and will be used on the new Lockheed Martin JSF. Sniper's window is made of sapphire because it is extraordinarily durable and transmits a wide range of wavelengths. Tests have shown that the window was unharmed after being struck by a piece of granite traveling at 197 mph and a metal nut at 150 mph. The rock shattered and the nut was bent but Sniper's sapphire window suffered no damage.

OIL & GAS

Afghanistan has significant oil and gas deposits of its own. "Afghanistan has one of the largest, if not the largest, reserve of natural gas, which was already being tapped by the Soviets prior to their invasion," Chamberlin said. At its peak in the late 1970s, Afghanistan supplied 70 to 90 percent of its natural gas output to the Soviet Union's natural gas grid via a link through Uzbekistan. Although the Soviets estimated Afghanistan's proven and probable natural gas reserves to be 5 trillion cubic feet (tcf) and its oil and condensate reserves at 95 million barrels in the 1970s, current estimates range much higher.

Afghan natural gas production reached 275 million cubic feet per day (mcf/d) in the mid-1970s but output fell to about 220 mcf/d due to declining reserves from producing fields. In 1980 the Jorquduq field was brought online and was expected to boost the nation's natural gas output to 385 mcf/d by the early 1980s. Oil exploration and development work as well as plans to build a 10,000 barrel per day refinery were halted after the 1979 Soviet invasion. Sabotage of infrastructure by the anti-Soviet mujahedeen fighters limited the country's total production to 290 mcf/d, an output level that held fairly steady until the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. In February 1998, the Taliban announced plans to revive the Afghan National Oil Company, which was abolished after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

U.S. OIL STRATEGY

Afghanistan occupies a central position in the U.S. strategy for the economic control of the oil and gas resources in the entire Middle East, according to experts. Current estimates indicate that, in addition to huge gas deposits, the Caspian basin may hold as much as 200 billion barrels of oil—33 times the estimated holdings of Alaska's North Slope.

V.R. Raghavan, a strategic analyst and former general in the Indian army, believes that the prospect of a western military presence in a region extending from Turkey to Tajikistan could not have escaped the geo-political strategists who waged the military campaign in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban regime and replace it with a government they could control and protect—with a multinational army.

In 1998, the California-based petroleum giant UNOCAL, which held 46.5 percent stakes in Central Asia Gas (CentGas), a consortium that planned an ambitious gas pipeline across Afghanistan, withdrew in frustration after several fruitless years. The pipeline was to stretch 762 miles from Turkmenistan's Dauletabad fields to Multan in Pakistan at an estimated cost of $1.9 billion. An additional $600 million would have brought the pipeline to energy-hungry India.

Among the many advantages of the Afghanistan route, according to experts from the oil and gas industry, is that it would terminate in the Arabian Sea, close to key Asian markets. Vice President Dick Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton, a major player in the oil industry, told oil industry executives in 1998, "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly, to become as strategically significant, as the Caspian."